Notices of planned and unplanned outages of online filing and fee payment services for the current and previous years are listed below. For planned outages, legal safeguards may be available, depending on the day and the duration of the outage. Where users can show that they were affected by an unplanned outage, legal safeguards can be invoked irrespective of its duration. Each outage in the list below that is not due to pre-announced maintenance work has been allocated a reference number. Users affected by a specific outage are advised to quote this reference number when communicating with the EPO about their case.
For detailed information, please see the notice from the EPO dated 22 October 2020 concerning the procedures and safeguards which apply under the EPC and the PCT in the event of outages of means of electronic filing and other online services (OJ EPO 2020, A120), Rule 134(1) EPC and point 5.5 of the ADA (Supplementary publication 4 – OJ EPO 2019)
