FCC IT Outage On Track To End Thursday
The outage of many of the FCC’s most used online systems (see 1508200049) has inconvenienced the attorneys and licensees who use them but hasn’t created any serious problems, industry attorneys told us Wednesday. The additional two days of the outage (see 1509080051) added to the inconvenience. Lawyers said they weren’t surprised the IT upgrades hadn't quite proceeded as planned. “It’s like that with any IT thing, not just at the FCC," said Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Dan Kirkpatrick.
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As of Wednesday, the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and the Electronic Document Management System were the only systems affected by the outage that had been restored, an FCC spokesman told us. He said the agency was on track to have all its systems, phones and Internet online by the 8 a.m. Thursday deadline announced Tuesday, but it was possible some other systems could be restored earlier.
Attorneys said the IT outage made it difficult to file required documents with the commission. Their main problem with the outage was the difficulty of accessing older documents, said the communications lawyers. “I've had to resort to a number of elaborate Google searches to find documents that would otherwise be on ECFS,” said Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Georgetown University Law Center Institute for Public Representation. The outage made it difficult to access important documents such as construction permits for clients, Fitzpatrick said. That’s a problem, but not “crippling,” he said.
The lack of online filing was a particular problem for time-sensitive issues, causing some attorneys to turn to more traditional methods. Fletcher Heald broadcast attorney Frank Jazzo filed for special temporary authority on paper during the outage. “I’m old enough that I remembered how,” he said. Hard-copy filings for STA are permitted by the commission, but attorneys previously had been encouraged to file them online. Wilkinson Barker broadcast attorney David Oxenford said lawyers were fielding calls this week from concerned clients who hadn’t known about the outage and were running into trouble accessing information.
The FCC announced Wednesday a Sept. 24 due date for paying regulatory fees. The outage took out the software that allows such fees to be filed, said Jazzo. The outage means attorneys will have less time to complete the fee filing process before the due date, he and Fitpatrick said.
Not all attorneys saw the outage as a negative. Because of the deadline extensions accompanying the outage, American Cable Association Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Ross Lieberman said he got extra time to file ex partes and filings on emergency information rules and the net neutrality small business exemption.
Most of the attorneys interviewed praised the FCC effort to get the word out about the outage and its two-day extension. “They’ve done a very good job of warning people what is going to happen,” said Schwartzman. Lieberman said the ample notice allowed him to prepare for the outage to keep it from being a problem, and Jazzo said lawyers in his office downloaded some documents so they would be available while the FCC systems were offline.