Visitors to the BIA website will find hundreds of pages without any content.
UPDATE: As of Thursday morning, the information has returned. The pages now appear as they did prior to the temporary outage. It's not an April Fool's joke but the majority of content on the Bureau of Indian Affairs website has gone missing in action. The main page appears normally in a web browser and the links to various press releases remain functional. But attempts to dive further into the site come up with empty pages so there's no information on tribal consultations, gaming, federal recognition or any of the other issues that fall under the BIA's purview. "We are aware of it and we are working on it," BIA spokesperson Nedra Darling said today. Darling did not know why the website is suffering from the problem. She indicated it could take some time for all of the content to reappear but she dismissed concerns of a potential hacking. The BIA's problem appears to have originated sometime on Tuesday afternoon. All of the broken pages bear the same ominous date and time stamp of "3/31/15 3:48 PM." None of the other websites within the Interior Department are experiencing problems at this point. The last time the BIA went through a major outage was during the Cobell trust fund litigation. In December 2001, the agency agreed to disconnect computers, servers and other equipment with sensitive Indian trust data from the Internet but ended up pulling everything offline.
The situation that led to widespread problems in Indian Country as trust fund checks were held back from individual Indian and tirbal beneficiaries. The dispute led to a series of nasty court battles that ended with the removal of Judge Royce C. Lamberth from the case in July 2006.
The BIA didn't get its public website back online until May 2008.Join the Conversation
