Note: As of early morning on May 1, the websites are functioning again.
The major websites of the Episcopal Church have been offline for at least two full days, as church IT staff and consultants are “working around the clock to understand this incident, its potential impact on information stored on our network, and to minimize service interruptions,” according to the Public Affairs Office.
The outages affect the church’s vast flagship site, episcopalchurch.org, as well as the prolific Episcopal News Service site at episcopalnewsservice.org. The outage has not affected two sites integral to the preparations for the June General Convention: generalconvention.org and vbinder.net.
After repeated inquiries from TLC, the Public Affairs Office issued the following April 30 statement:
“Over the weekend, The Episcopal Church experienced a computer network disruption, and our IT staff and third-party consultants immediately began an investigation that revealed unauthorized activity within our network. Out of an abundance of caution, Episcopal Church IT staff and our third-party computer specialists have isolated the church’s network for further investigation. IT staff and outside consultants are working around the clock to understand this incident, its potential impact on information stored on our network, and to minimize service interruptions. Updates will be provided as they become available.”
Episcopal News Service issued a statement late in the day saying: “We expect the website to be back online on May 1.” When asked if the church expects episcopalchurch.org to recover on the same timeline, a spokesperson declined to add to the written statement.
The church made its first public statement about the outage on April 28, in a late-afternoon Facebook post.
Any website can go down temporarily, but it’s highly unusual for a large mature site to be out for days at a time. A web search suggests that two of the most common reasons for an extended outage are expiration of a domain name or a malicious external attack. But the domain registrations for both sites are paid for until 2025 and 2026, and the church’s statement cites “unauthorized activity within our network.”