House of Representatives’ website down during global IT outage

MANILA, Philippines (2nd update, 6:25 p.m.) — The website of the House of Representatives went offline on Friday as a major cyber outage affected computer-reliant services around the world.

House of Representatives’ Media Affairs and Public Relations Service Director Jake Santiago told Philstar.com that he has alerted the information technology department.

The site’s homepage was replaced by an error page generated from cloud-based cybersecurity company Cloudflare, which provides a system protecting websites from attacks.

It is unclear as of press time whether the lower house website’s downtime is directly linked to the global outage.

The outage has also grounded flights and affected television broadcasts and telecommunications.

Initial reports indicate that the havoc on global IT systems stems from an update pushed out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) said on Friday, however, that none of its systems or assets have been affected by the massive cyber outage.

The DICT said it is monitoring the cyber disruptions caused by the cybersecurity provider, which it did not name, and confirmed that companies in the Philippines that use the product have been affected.

“We assure the public that the Department does not use the same cybersecurity service provider,” the department said.

The DICT added that it is in “continuous communication with relevant stakeholders to obtain detailed information and assess the full impact of this incident.”

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Editor’s Note: The DICT’s statement is appended to this report in the latest update.