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What’s going on at the Energy Information Administration?

Published on 18 Comments on What’s going on at the Energy Information Administration?

On Monday I wanted to find out if the price of gasoline had gone up or down, so I headed over to the EIA site. But there were problems:

Hmmm. Here is Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Also this:

Note that this is a pinned tweet, as if EIA expects it to stick around for a long time. And it will! Until Monday at least.

So what's going on? And why won't EIA tell us—aside from explaining that it's not a hack, so it must be some kind of internal fuckup? I mean, what kind of "systems" issue can bring their IT infrastructure to its knees so fully that they can't even manage to post new gasoline prices for a full week?

18 thoughts on “What’s going on at the Energy Information Administration?”

  1. Special Newb

    It could still be Russian action with any hacking. An existing sleeper agent may have used their perfectly valid credentials to fuck things up. It could be an attempt by Russia to warn off the US without doing something do consequential the US has to respond.

    Or maybe the person who approved the tweet really believed there is no hack but there is and they were kept in the dark intentionally.

  2. PostRetro

    Microsoft obviously released new security updates which broke their feeds when they accidentally discovered that all department computers updated to windows 11 and lost Internet Explorer. /s

    2. Special Newb

      Oh, that doesnt sound good. Switching methodologies I mean they usually do that when it looks really bad.

    1. Austin

      I mean, he doesn't have a uterus, nor does he hang out routinely with people who might be worried about the government temporarily hijacking the use of their uteruses after every sex act, so I'm sure he only cares about Roe v Wade in terms of "how it will play politically" and thus he needs to wait until the other TV pundits weigh in on the topic.

      1. Crissa

        He's also retired and doesn't feed on the news cycle anymore.

        It's not like we come here for breaking news.

    2. mudwall jackson

      the news on roe broke weeks ago. if you're looking for someplace to express your outrage, there are plenty of alternatives.

      1. iamr4man

        I guess that was the point of the leak. Why talk about it? We already knew it was happening a long time ago. Time to move on.

    3. Bobber

      He started this work on Monday. The ruling came out today, Friday. So it was probably just about ready to post. And perhaps Kevin wants to spend a bit of time on his abortion write-up before just blasting out the first thing that came to mind.

  5. Doctor Jay

    Cloudflare died Monday night. This resulted in widespread outages in many services. I don't know why. But it seems to be back in operation now, so it's probably not related.

  6. D_Ohrk_E1

    Existing database is stable and working, but new data cannot be added? Hmm...

    Someone lost their password.

    j/k

  7. memyselfandi

    "I mean, what kind of "systems" issue can bring their IT infrastructure to its knees so fully that they can't even manage to post new gasoline prices for a full week?" It's obvious to an old time computer user. This is the week they chose to upgrade to windows 11.

  8. ADM

    Just a possibility, but it could be as simple as an automatic "update" of the database management system that wasn't properly tested prior to distribution. I used to work for the govt, and have experienced stuff like this. Typically the government now has to get Oracle (just for example) to send an expert out to clean up the mess.

  9. Duke

    I mean, Atlassian was messed up for like a month due to some anodyne fuckups. And that's a company who is supposed to be well versed in tech. It would not surprise me at all to hear a government agency accidentally found a lurking time bomb in their processes, and 2 weeks is well within the time frame I might guess for it

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