Due to an extraordinarily high volume of traffic on the website, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has declared a one day shut down for Federal agencies in Washington. The shut down is only to last for the day of Tuesday, the ninth day of February 2010 and will imply inaccessibility to government web pages.

OPM has decided that nonemergency workers will be allowed a leave for the amount of hours they were scheduled to work on Tuesday. The leave will be counted as an ‘excused leave’ entitling the workers to their regular pay. The leave does not, however, include workers on leave without pay or workers on leave with a non-pay status for any other reasons.

Emergency workers are anticipated to check in to work at their normal times. OPM posted this notice on their status & schedules site on 7:15 PM yesterday, Monday, February 8, 2010.

Employees on different time schedules will not be entitled to an excused leave.

The OPM’s main job is to search for and then to recruit and retain a high standard of quality workers for the American government. Located on the 1900 E street NW in Washington, the OPM office is also in charge of informing all members of Federal agencies of their respective time schedules and delays or disruptions caused to their work force.

Normal activity should resume in a short time though no specific date of resumption has been given by the official Operating Status & Schedules site.

OPM