No, the White House hasn't stopped taking people's calls

You may have seen a fair bit of news on this topic.

Reports emerged Monday evening that the White House had shut public access to its switchboard.

A message greeted callers, asking them to use a form on the White House website, the official White House Facebook page or President Trump's Facebook page.

As a piece by Variety noted at the time:

Facebook has long offered businesses and other operators of Facebook pages the ability to directly communicate with their consumers via Messenger, including via messages sent directly from the Facebook website.

The company added the ability to use bots that can engage in simple conversations via Messenger last April.

It doesn’t seem like the White House is currently using any of those technologies.

The White House apparently forgot that 13 per cent of American adults don't use the internet.

It has since been presumed that the volume of calls the White House received strained the switchboard's resources.

Press Assistant Giovanna Coia told the Los Angeles Times over the phone that there were plans to get the phone lines up, both the switchboard access for the public and the audio comments line, but that these had no timeframe:

We’re still learning how to work our computers.

Some have reported getting through to live operators, including the Huffington Post, following an automated message.

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