"A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.
The nsa.gov Web site was unresponsive at 7 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and continued to be unavailable throughout the morning for Internet users.
The Web site was unreachable because of a problem with the NSA's DNS (Domain Name System) servers, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks. DNS servers are used to translate things like the Web addresses typed into machine-readable Internet Protocol addresses that computers use to find each other on the Internet.
The agency's two authoritative DNS servers were unreachable Thursday morning, McPherson said.
Because this DNS information is sometimes cached by Internet service providers, the NSA would still be temporarily reachable by some users, but unless the problem is fixed, NSA servers will be knocked completely off-line. That means that e-mail sent to the agency will not be delivered, and in some cases, e-mail being sent by the NSA would not get through.
"We are aware of the situation and our techs are working on it," a NSA spokeswoman said at 9:45 a.m. PT. She declined to identify herself."
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