The websites for the NIH and other health agencies are experiencing technical difficulties this weekend. And there’s a new “five things” email — now due every Monday.

The website for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the agency responsible for overseeing federal research in the U.S. and one of the premier research organizations in the world, went down over the weekend.

When users attempt to access “nih.gov,” they see an error message in their browsers.

If you go to “http://www.nih.gov,” however, the page should load.

It looks like a problem with some of the nameservers perhaps?tldr.nettime.org/@ww/11408997…

— foxfirefey (@foxfirefey.bsky.social) 2025-03-02T03:23:19.512Z

Some related websites, like PubMed — an invaluable collection of research — have also had outages this weekend.

It doesn’t seem to be limited to NIH. Other sites across health agencies have also experienced outages:

Just wanted to note I have been monitoring DNS issues across HHS sites all weekend. It does seem to have most effected NCBI/NLM sites, but I’ve seen almost every HHS domain effected at some point. I don’t have any evidence at this point of any intentional outage or data removal, could be many things

— J. Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈 (@jaspar.bsky.social) 2025-03-02T15:04:08.190Z

As Parker notes, it’s still not clear what’s behind the outages.

My guess: This is the sort of breakage you see when you fire the people who keep these sites running.

I’ll continue updating this post as I learn more.

Not a Doctor is 100% free. Sign up now for more updates on health, science, and technology.

Five things you did this week

Speaking of “government efficiency,” there’s a new email asking federal workers what they did last week.

In what has become a now-typical blunt fashion, workers at federal agencies were told they need to detail what they worked on the previous week — and they need to send the list every Monday by midnight.

Here’s the email for health agencies:

Subject: What did you do last week? Part II

Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Monday at 11:59pmET.

Please do not send links, attachments, or any classified/sensitive information. If all of your activities are classified or sensitive, please write “All of my activities are sensitive”.

Supervisors are once again telling employees this is not a big deal, according to my sources. The advice from the federal union still seems sound: you can just copy/paste your job description.

It seems these emails will be fed into large language models (LLMs — like ChatGPT) for unclear purposes. Elon Musk has also said the emails are to prove employees aren’t dead.

Look, I’m not trying to make light of serious situations here, but if I were the Office of Personnel Management, I would not ask for potentially disgruntled employees to send me bullets. Is it so hard to write out “bullet points”?

It’s also worth remembering this message from a previous HHS email on the topic:

Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.

Got a tip? Message me on Signal at melodyschreiber.06 from a non-work device.