YIKES

White House Email Goes Down

As Obama speaks at Penn State about innovation.

Is cold turkey really the best way to wean President Obama off his Blackberry? White House officials confirmed Thursday that their email had been out most of the day Thursday—leaving Obama without access to his account while speaking about cutting-edge technology at Penn State University. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said unclassified White House email accounts went down around 7:45 a.m. Thursday, and the outage continued throughout the day. White House staffers were forced to communicate with 20th-century methods: landlines, in-person meetings, and printouts. Pfeiffer, meanwhile, took to Twitter to communicate, assuring everyone that, “Verizon is working to solve the problem.”