President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in the morning, then he flew to Pennsylvania to deliver a speech on innovation and small business development.
But the White House was unable to communicate any of that over e-mail. The White House's unclassified e-mail systems were down most of the day.
Many White House officials are on Twitter, so that became a sort of stopgap.
Communications director Dan Pfeiffer tweeted: "White House unclassified e-mail system went down shortly before 8 AM. Verizon is working to solve the problem."
Throughout the day, the press office paged reporters in the White House each time a press release came out on paper.
For reporters outside of the White House, there was silence.
The outage lasted just over seven hours.
Shortly after 3 pm eastern time, reporters received President Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, as spoken 6 hours earlier.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDAxNDQ2NDAxMDEyNzU2NzM2ODA3ZGI1ZA001))
