An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:
The U.S. State Department’s email system underwent a worldwide outage Friday, affecting all its unclassified communications within and outside of the department.
The system was fully restored by Friday afternoon [after 12 hours], said a State Department official briefed on the incident who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

It was not clear what caused the early morning outage, but spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters it was not “any external action or interference.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US State Department Suffers Worldwide Email Outage