The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that its online services are currently under-performing, or not at all.
A power outage has damaged some of the equipment managing the provision of services related to trademark and patent processing.
An announcement at USPTO.gov states:
“A major power outage at USPTO headquarters occurred last night resulting in damaged equipment that required the subsequent shutdown of many of our online and IT systems. This includes our filing, searching, and payment systems, as well as the systems our examiners across the country use.
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.
Status updates and alternative filing methods can be found on our systems alert page (www.uspto.gov/blog/ebiz/) as they become available, as well as on our Facebook (www.facebook.com/uspto.gov) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/uspto) accounts.
Thank you for your patience as we work to restore full service as soon as possible.”
Indeed, the searchable database at USPT.gov remains offline; problems began on December 22nd and continue until today.
The USPTO trademark database provides information used in UDRP filings for domain names infringing on marks; while the database is offline or partially accessible, there should be a drop in the number of new UDRP cases being filed, or current filings being processed.
Clearly, not the best of Christmas gifts to busy law offices and their clients!
