Patent Office Power Outage Shutdown
The Patent Office went down hard on December 22, 2015. A subdued Facebook post initially said: “We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties with some of our online systems, but we are hard at work and intent on having services back on line as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience, and stay tuned for details.” However, very quickly it became clear that the incident was major – catastrophic really. For some time, most (if not all) of the pages at upsto.gov were displaying 404 messages, including even the blog directed toward posting updates about the status of the electronic filing systems.
Apparently, the power supply lines at the USPTO incurred a “malfunction,” causing significant damage to two power filtration systems which otherwise provide power in a regulated form to the USPTO. These filtration systems are huge and could not be replaced quickly or easily.
The outage took out all of trademark and patent filing, searching, payment, and examination capabilities, effectively shutting down nearly everything the Patent and Trademark Office, and patent and trademark lawyers, do. For some of us, it was a nice week-long break when many of are taking holiday. For others, however, it was a stressful nightmare of re-learning Priority Mail Express (formerly Express Mail) rules and trying to get the Post Office – sometimes through horrible weather – to make filing deadlines. Filing by mail was still an option – but very few, if any, practitioners file by paper anymore, and I would guess that most who don’t file by paper have no clue how to file by mail. Another good reason to file early! The Office eventually did declare a few of the down days as federal holidays, purportedly giving applicants until the next (operational) business day to file. However, I cautioned colleagues not observe this PTO-granted grace period, as it was not clear that the PTO had the statutory authority to declare a holiday in this manner to toll both domestic and foreign deadlines. Better to mail it in that to find out years from now in litigation that the PTO “holiday” counted for nothing.
The systems are now up, but I have been warning clients this week to get me everything early because I believe the filing system is extremely fragile right now, given that it will probably be more heavily loaded by backed-up filings from the past week.
While the explanation that the Patent Office providfed is not entirely clear – and few details beyond this have been revealed – I am sure the Office did work tirelessly to get the systems back up. And now they are. What we can learn from this how fragile the filing system is. Yes, it apparently took a major power surge to destroy the electronic systems, but when it did, there was no backup. Or, there was a backup, but the backup was tied to a backbone common to the main system – which really isn’t a backup at all.
Practitioners have complained for years that the electronic filing system is antiquated, but the Office has failed to update it. Perhaps this will instigate a technology change at the office that represents innovation leadership in the world.