Homeland security staff locked out of network

Washington, Feb. 22: Some US department of homeland security employees in the Washington area and Philadelphia were unable to access some agency computer networks on Tuesday, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

It was not clear how widespread the issue was or how significantly it affected daily functions at the department of homeland security, a large government agency whose responsibilities include immigration services, border security and cyber defence.

In a statement, a DHS official confirmed a network outage that temporarily affected four US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) facilities in the Washington area due to an “expired DHS certificate.”

Reuters first reported the incident earlier on Tuesday, which a source familiar with the matter said also affected a USCIS facility in Philadelphia.

Employees began experiencing problems logging into networks on Tuesday morning due to a problem related to domain controllers, or servers that process authentication req-uests, which could not validate personal identity verification (PIV) cards used by federal workers and contractors to access certain information systems, according to the source. Some employees were able to access systems through a virtual private network. It was not clear if other branches of DHS were affected.