Last night’s dueling Obama/Boehner speeches settled at least one matter: when the President asks people to contact Congress, Congress can’t handle it:
Monday night and Tuesday morning checks of the websites of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., showed a “Server is too busy” response on an otherwise blank screen, as did the House Ways and Means Committee website on Tuesday morning. Boehner’s separate representative site was down on Monday night, also, though the district and House Majority Leader sites of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., were working.
In his article, National Journal’s David Beard also reports that the Congressional phone system almost joined those websites and others in crashing, but that Twitter survived (thank god). So Congressmembers could use social media to send messages OUT to constituents, though I doubt they could listen to many of them in return (comments on Boehner’s Facebook post about his speech already number above 4000).
Website go boom? Hey kids, time to upgrade that infrastructure! Oh, wait — that would cost money.
– cpd
This probably doesn’t translate well for House Information Services when they’re trying to get more members to adopt their ih-house “cloud” system.
[…] night, both of the digital and analog varieties, who’d flooded Twitter at his requrest and crashed Congressional websites and the House switchboard this week: “Most of all, I want to thank the American people,” Obama said. […]