Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?
That IT person has 4 hours to shut-down the agency internet presence for an indeterminate amount of time. Also, their server farm may not have power in 4 days, better to set up a simple website on some "essential" box somewhere.
Especially since the USDA receives information from across the country and performs statistical analysis. It would be safer to shutdown the dynamic services rather than let it get hacked. In 4 hours they probably do not have enough time to separate dynamic and static information when they also have to do a backup and a bunch of paperwork.
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This is a little confusing. The USDA's website is presumably hosted on some server, so what exactly is preventing it from remaining online?
I mean, the domain is clearly still here, and there's a web page serving that error, so...
Just speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?
That IT person has 4 hours to shut-down the agency internet presence for an indeterminate amount of time. Also, their server farm may not have power in 4 days, better to set up a simple website on some "essential" box somewhere.
Especially since the USDA receives information from across the country and performs statistical analysis. It would be safer to shutdown the dynamic services rather than let it get hacked. In 4 hours they probably do not have enough time to separate dynamic and static information when they also have to do a backup and a bunch of paperwork.
The funding to support server + bandwidth + sysadmins.