USPTO Systems Status and Availability

Wednesday Aug 22, 2018

PALM Maintenance Update

Statement Update at 8:30 a.m. August 23, 2018

USPTO’s systems are operational from a filing and fee payment perspective. You can file your applications electronically, but if you do you will likely see a delay in your documents being viewable on our systems. Also, those who filed by paperwork over the past few days will not see your documents on our systems for 5-10 business days.

We’ve reported that the content available to you in PAIR may not be valid past Wednesday, August 15 at 12:01 a.m. ET. We are now seeing some real time data appearing in PAIR, but it will take some more time for all the data to fill in. In the meantime, as noted above, please proceed with the understanding that content since August 15 may still be unavailable. Our team of experts continues to monitor all of the systems that have been affected by this outage.

Also as noted, EFS-Web is working and we encourage applicants to use it going forward. However, alternative filing options remain available, such as EFS-Web Contingency and paper filing should EFS-Web become unavailable. Read more about how to receive and accept filings and payments through alternative means.

Given the availability of the alternative filing methods, the USPTO does not plan to extend deadlines. Applicants affected by this outage will have an option to avoid, or receive a refund of, paper filing fees. The director will prescribe a procedure for re-submitting applications electronically to receive a refund of the paper filing fee (or to not incur a fee if not yet paid). Applicants who follow this procedure will maintain their original filing dates for applications filed by paper during the outage. Once the details of this procedure are ready, we will post that information on our website. In the meantime, applicants should continue to file and pay associated fees pursuant to current laws and regulations.

While we continue to complete the accurate restoration of all services, the following systems are not yet fully functional:

  • Private Patent Application Information Retrieval (Private PAIR)
  • Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public PAIR)

We are aware of how this system outage impacts those who have patent-related business with the USPTO and we know you have questions on a variety of topics. We posted answers to some questions we know you have or that you may be wondering about the PALM database issue. We will update those questions and answers after this incident is complete.

Further status updates will be issued on this page (www.uspto.gov/blog/ebiz) as they become available. At a minimum, you will see updates at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. daily until service is fully restored.