|
'You've got no mail' -- tech glitch hits Obama White House
2009-01-27
WASHINGTON (AFP) - President Barack Obama's aides, who ran the most tech-savvy US election campaign in history, were forced into a red-faced admission Monday -- the White House email system has crashed. "Our email system is not working so well," press spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters at the start of his daily briefing. "We'll endeavor to get you information from earlier in the day, hopefully in a little bit more of a timely manner, if we can get the email to work." At one stage, Obama aides were forced to turn back the clock and hand out copies of memoranda signed by the president on cutting global warming, not via email as is normal, but by the dead tree method, on paper. The email meltdown was all the more embarrassing as the White House only last week had revealed that the famously connected new president Barack Obama had won a battle to keep his BlackBerry -- albeit a high security encrypted device. During the 2008 campaign, the Obama team pioneered new ways to put technology to political ends, including the use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and even used a Twitter feed. They even announced the selection of Joseph Biden as Obama's vice presidential nominee by SMS text message.
| 
