USPTO Systems Back Online

Posted Tuesday, December 29, 2015.

Original post of 12/23 here

Updated post of 12/24 here

Further update of 12/28 here

The USPTO announced mid-day on Monday that the systems affected by the outage caused by the power failure on December 22 were back up and running. I have successfully accessed the systems for filing responses for clients, obtaining new actions and searching for previous patents/applications. While the USPTO says they may need to take systems off line again in the near future to perform more permanent repairs, they will be able to do so in a scheduled fashion with prior notification to its constituents.

At this point, the outage was attributed to an anomaly in power lines feeding power conditioning systems at the USPTO. The anomaly damaged the pair of power conditioning systems, leading to the power outage and subsequent damage to the systems.

The proximity of the outage to the federal Christmas holiday may have been a fortunate occurrence, albeit unlucky for the Information Technology employees and contractors at the patent office who lost their holiday time.

No further updates on the situation should be needed from here.

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