Most e-mail back on Capitol Hill

Most of the House e-mail services were back up Friday afternoon, after lawmakers and staffers spent nearly 24 hours without them.

On Thursday afternoon a circuit breaker overloaded a House data center. Officials for the Chief Administrative Office (CAO) finished restoring power to the data center after working throughout Thursday night and Friday morning. E-mail users could still experience delays late Friday as the day's backlog of e-mails begin to come in, said the CAO.

{mosads}The overload, which did not affect Internet service, occurred as the House 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,” Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard said 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 being sent 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.