The Department of Justice announced that a furloughed employee returned to work Monday morning to reopen the Amber Alert website, which had been shut down since late Sunday night.
“The Amber Alert system was never interrupted, but to eliminate any confusion, the informational site maintained by the Justice Department has been restored,” a spokesperson said.
A notice posted to the website earlier read, “Due to the lapse in federal funding, this Office of Justice Programs website is unavailable.”
“All the sites that had to go offline were put behind a firewall so that they couldn’t be hacked while the IT people were on furlough,” a DOJ spokesperson told the Huffington Post.
The program is named after Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old girl abducted and killed in Texas in 1996. It uses multiple means to assist law enforcement agencies in the search for abducted children.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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