The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak was impeded by the crash of the email system used by the Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary’s office, according to
a report by Politico.
The outage delayed some messages by up to 11 hours and aggravated
existing tensions within the department, the report alleges.
MediaPost was unable to independently confirm the outage or its purported impact at deadline.
According to
Politico, the outage was caused by an email test run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, a branch of HHS. HHS has taken control of the Medicare unit’s email operation and
is auditing its infrastructure, Politico says.
Medicare officials had not alerted HHS leaders about the Sunday email blast.
At that moment, however, “top officials
were negotiating with the White House over a soon-to-be-announced coronavirus funding plan and tackling
other urgent decisions — which were interrupted by the email outage,” Politico writes.