CIO.gov Website Suffers Second Outage Since November

The federal website for government IT strategy, CIO.gov, has been inaccessible for more than 24 hours--its second outage in three months.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said Thursday that the site is undergoing "hardware maintenance." Ironically, the problems come in the wake of a White House order earlier this year that requires federal agencies to use the Web to better serve and engage with the public.

"We are transitioning to a more robust solution that will avoid such disruptions," OMB spokesperson Moira Mack said.

She provided no further details, and the OMB did not reply to a request for more specific information about the outage, the work being done, or when that work would be completed.

CIO.gov has been down since Wednesday and continued to be offline throughout the day Thursday.

Persistent problems with CIO.gov are not the only ones the federal government has had in recent months keeping websites online.

These issues with website availability seem incongruous with more ambitious federal plans to move e-mail and other in-house services to the cloud and have agencies share cloud-based services among them.

A week after the CIO.gov outage in November, hardware problems knocked the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) site and some of its intranet services offline for nearly a week. The month before, a Congressional committee convened over problems with a relaunch of the USAJobs.gov website that lasted for weeks, making the site and many of its services inaccessible.

The committee found that the root of the trouble lay in historic challenges with IT project development and management at the Office of Personnel and Management, which oversees the site.