Multiple United States government websites went down as President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union address.
Websites for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service displayed technical difficulty screens for 20 minutes on Thursday night.
The cause for the outages is unknown. According to Search.gov, a search engine by and for the federal government, planned maintenance was scheduled between 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday.
While the government agency websites are down, much of the nation was watching Biden’s pivotal State of the Union.
‘Why are a bunch of government websites down at this moment in time. It seems like everyone is distracted by the state of the union so there’s a bunch of backdoor shady stuff going on right now,’ said Twitter used John Winters.
User Jonathan Newburg said, ‘Very strange that US Government websites are down during the #StateOfTheUnion address.’
Speaking to a nationwide, primetime audience, Biden, 81, is combatting low approval ratings and questions about his fitness for office.
Biden started off his speech with a joke before pivoting to an attack on his rival for the presidency, Donald Trump.
His goal with his speech is to present himself as an energetic choice worthy of a second term.
Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin is ‘on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. And if anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you he will not.’
The government website crash is the latest in a recent slew of social media and communications outages.
On Wednesday, the networking platform LinkedIn crashed with thousands of users seeing an error message on the site.
The error message appeared around 9 pm, according to outrage tracking service Down Detector. LinkedIn announced it is ‘back up and running’ around an hour later and apologized for the interruption.
Facebook, Messenger and Instagram were offline for 1.5 hours on Tuesday throughout the US, the UK, parts of Europe, China, Australia and Mexico.
