‘Major Power Outage’ at PTO Knocks Out Agency’s Filing, Searching, Payment Systems
A “major power outage” Tuesday night at Patent and Trademark Office headquarters in Washington “damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems,” the agency said in a message posted Wednesday at the top…
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of its home page. The outage and secondary damage knocked out “our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use,” PTO said. “We are working diligently to assess the operational impact on all our systems and to determine how soon they can be safely brought back into service.” The agency will give “status updates” on its systems alert page “as they become available,” and on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, it said. At 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, a systems alert page update reported that "the impacts may be felt through the Christmas holiday."