Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

By Cynthia Needham and Katherine Gregg
Journal State House Bureau

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- At 4:15 p.m., with the state House session already under way, Majority Leader Gordon Fox said the House is postponing its calendar and all hearings that had been scheduled for tonight as the legislature's Web site is still down.

Common Cause, a citizens advocacy group, was among those who had asked House legislators to cancel the committee hearings and votes on bills the public cannot access.

The state Senate had already postponed today's floor calendar and all scheduled hearings.

The site crashed Monday afternoon due to what state officials called a "critical hardware failure." To repair it, technicians had to wait for a part to be shipped from Oklahoma. It arrived late last night and staffers worked through the night and are still working this afternoon trying to fix the problem.

The House and Senate sessions are proceeding, but without an agenda. All hearings and the calendars will be rescheduled once the site is working again.

"Even though the calendar and the committee hearings were posted prior to system going down, we are concerned if people tried to access bills or agendas over past couple of days, they would be unable to do so because the system is down," said Senate Spokesman Greg Pare.

Comments

Shaking his head said:

Every major corporation has a disaster recovery plan which addresses computer outages. This is not rocket science. If they're looking for a reason to trim the IT staff, this is a pretty good one.

It makes me wonder what kind of shape the rest of the systems are in. An audit is in order.

Link | March 11, 2009 6:06 PM
Report Abuse

---

Leave a comment

Please be civil. Vicious comments, personal attacks and profanity won't be published. Name and email are required; email address will not publish.

Name:

Email:

URL:  

Remember personal info?

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.