Deleted articles? Official Gazette says entire website down

MANILA, Philippines – Netizens have taken to Facebook to claim that Official Gazette entries about a speech of the late president Corazon Aquino and articles about the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos have been deleted.

However, Presidential Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy explained that the articles cannot be accessed because the entire Official Gazette website is down.

No articles posted by previous administrations have been deleted, she said.

“We would like to reiterate to the public that we do not delete any files or documents from previous administrations,” said Badoy on Friday, July 13.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) had announced on July 3 that 117 government websites are not accessible due to a hardware failure in one of its Government Web Hosting Service storage systems.

The department has given assurances they are working to get the websites back up.

“Though some websites are already up, among those that are still down is the government’s online Official Gazette,” said Badoy.

As of writing, the Official Gazette website is not accessible.

The same day DICT announced the hardware failure, a post about 2 articles on the Ferdinand Marcos regime going missing circulated on social media.

Kristoffer Pasion, the netizen who tweeted about the supposedly missing articles, later on said he was told these articles may not have been accessible because the entire Official Gazette website was down. – Pia Ranada/Rappler.com