E-mail down on Capitol Hill

House lawmakers and staffers were without access to e-mail Friday after a circuit breaker overloaded a House data center Thursday afternoon.

Officials with the Chief Administrative Office (CAO) said they dispatched computer engineers Thursday night to resolve the failed service and expected the current e-mail outage to be resolved sometime Friday. They attempted to reinforce the “strained” system with new electrical equipment all morning Friday.

{mosads}The overload, which has not affected Internet service, occurred as the House has continued to add more servers to satisfy the increasing electronic traffic to and from Congress. As a result, the power supply became overburdened and exhausted.

In an attempt to address a long-term solution, the CAO took the opportunity to push for more energy-efficient computer servers in a Dear Colleague letter hand-delivered to member offices Friday that also outlined the plan for getting the e-mail service back up.

“In the coming months, I will make a series of recommendations that such infrastructure be installed into our data centers,” said Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard in the letter. “By reducing the amount of energy the House’s computing currently demands, and by creating electrical backup systems, I am confident we will greatly diminish outages like this from happening again.”

The e-mail outage is not related to the overload that occurred last week through the House.gov website’s “Write Your Representative” function. The CAO was forced to limit the number of e-mails going through to member offices through the website because they reached unusually high numbers as voters offered their opinions on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.