An outage affecting several areas in Washington interrupted power to government buildings, including the White House, State Department and the Capitol.
The State Department, according to several Twitter reports, was forced to suspend its daily news briefing when the power was lost.
The White House, however, was affected briefly before the power was returned. It’s not clear whether a generator kicked in to return power to the White House complex outage.
At one point during the outage, the Secret Service were forced to manually check bags of hard-pass holders entering the grounds because the outage has shut down their magnetometers and cameras used to check purses and bags for unauthorized materials.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed the White House outage but said President Obama was in a meeting and didn’t know it had happened before the power was restored.
“Some parts of the White House complex did have to go onto backup power — and some of the issues have been addressed in such a way that we are now back on regular power,” Earnest told reporters Tuesday at his daily press briefing.
“Things are slowly but surely returning to normal at the White House complex,” he said.
“I’m not under the impression that the president was in any way affected by this,” he continued. “I happen to have been in a meeting with him [when the outage occurred] and after the meeting he was told it had occurred.”
Earnest said the outage’s impact on White House workers was “minimal” and “there were some of us who weren’t even aware of it.”
“A complex like the White House has built in redundancies to combat a situation like this,” he said.
Reuters reported that the U.S. Capitol complex for at least several minutes was forced to depend on a backup generator and some Metro stations in Washington were running on emergency lighting.
