Office of Government Ethics (OGE) Website Outage, January 13, 2017

Background

On January 13, 2017, Tamara Keith of KRWG/NPR reported the following:

The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight.

OGE website administrator Michael Hanson told NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben the site failure came as a result of the usually sleepy office’s website receiving 1 million visitors in just the last three days.

Normally, it gets about 300,000 — in an entire year.

There’s a reason the website’s traffic has spiked. The office’s director, Walter Shaub Jr., has been conducting an unusually public discussion about ethics with the president-elect and the people he has chosen for his Cabinet.

Shortly after this article, I filed a FOIA request on January 16th, 2017, for documents relating to this crash.

I received the following packet of documents on February 15, 2017.

Declassified Documents

 Office of Government Ethics (OGE) Website Outage, January 13, 2017 [12 Pages, 0.5MB]

https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/oge/OGE-WEBCRASH1.pdf

 Additional Pages Released April 6, 2017 [2 Pages, 0.9MB]

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crash, Office of Government Ethics, OGE