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Amber Alert site restored ‘to eliminate any confusion’

Josh Peterson Tech Editor
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After a morning of outrage over the DOJ’s Amber Alert program website being offline, the U.S. government’s site for the crime-fighting tool was restored around 11 a.m. EDT on Monday.

The Obama administration caught heat throughout the morning for taking down its site for the DOJ’s Amber Alert program while keeping First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” website up and running.

An Amber Alert uses available phone, Internet and broadcast technology to aid law enforcement searches for missing children. The alerts are issued by states and counties.

“The U.S. Department of Justice coordinates the AMBER Alert program on a national basis,” states the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on its website.

Buzzfeed and the Washington Post reported that the Amber Alert system itself is still fully functional and that only AmberAlert.gov — the DOJ’s informational site — was taken offline.

By midday Monday, visitors were able to visit AmberAlert.gov once again, but no explanation for why it was taken offline or restored appeared on the site.

Instead, the Huffington Post reports that a DOJ spokesperson told the publication, “The amber alert system was never interrupted, but to eliminate any confusion, the informational site maintained by the Justice Department has been restored.”

The Justice Department did not respond to The Daily Caller’s multiple requests for comment by the time of publication.

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Josh Peterson