On Thursday evening, during President Joe Biden’s fourth State of the Union address, a significant number of essential federal government websites encountered complete outages. It remains unclear as of early Friday morning whether these outages were directly linked to the annual speech, which took place at the U.S. Capitol.
However, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, various government agencies’ websites remained completely offline for several hours while the president was delivering his address. The affected agencies encompassed the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service.
🚨#BREAKING: Multiple government websites, including DHS, ICE, FEMA and the Secret Service, are down. Cause is currently unknown pic.twitter.com/VTxKagEsQf
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) March 8, 2024
Truth Social, the social media platform launched by former President Donald Trump, has also experienced disruptions in service.
BREAKING: Federal Government websites go down as Biden deliver's SOTU address; cause unknown pic.twitter.com/Ff0Zg1KqQA
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 8, 2024
The social media platform X witnessed a widespread dissemination of the outages, with users linking them to various factors such as Biden’s speech, global tensions, and recent website outages.
Seems a lot of this is happening right now.
There’s a local casino under cyberattack as well right now where I live. 🤔 https://t.co/8kHmBVDBjS
— id0n0u (@id0n0u) March 8, 2024