I don’t know about you, but when my internet goes down, I go into a rage. Everything I do revolves around my internet. My job, Xbox, my PC, Facebook, it’s like a bad dream, and I’m just a 22-year old guy from Ohio. I imagine that when the internet goes down at a place like, oh, say, The Pentagon, things are a lot worse. I mean, it is the center of our nation’s defense and all.
The United States military’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) recently shut down access to the internet and Blackberry service while work was being conducted to fix an unspecified problem. The shutdown occurred sometime around 10:00 a.m. local time yesterday which meant that not a single person in the Pentagon had access to the internet. In addition to that, a lot of military, including combatant commands, did not have internet access either.
According to its website, DISA is a Defense Department agency that provides command and control support to national-level leaders and joint-war fighters across the full spectrum of operations. DISA sent out a network-wide notification Thursday morning by way of email explaining that “users are experiencing problems browsing the internet due to a DISA-wide outage.” The email also noted that, as a result, “ALL Blackberry, email web-browsing, and VPN services are affected.”
Interestingly enough, Pentagon workers did report that their email services were still up and running just fine, they just weren’t able to access the internet. One Pentagon official familiar with network security stated that the shutdown was not in response to some kind of cyber attack. The official noted that if it were an attack, “we’d all know about it and DISA would have done a blanket protocol, shutting down all sorts of access until they isolated the source of the attack.”
A DISA spokesman told FOX that “there is no indication of an attack” and it is expected that the internet will come back online slowly. Techs in the military are currently working to resolve the problem, which could be affecting nearly 20,000 military and civilian personnel in the Pentagon alone.
Source: Hearld Sun – Internet and Blackberry services shut down at Pentagon
