USPTO made a wrong decision just now. Monday morning is absolutely the wrong time to take down Patentcenter for maintenance.
Yes, just now this big red “502” message is what I get on a Monday morning (10:45 AM Eastern Time) when I try to use Patentcenter.
Of course what you might wonder is whether the USPTO’s System Status and Availability web page might shed some light on why Patentcenter is down for maintenance right now. Quoted at right is the entirety of what the SSAA page says right now.
They could have done this last Monday, which was a federal holiday. They had the whole of this past weekend. But no, they need to take it down davka* on a regular Monday morning.
If Director Vidal doesn’t get why we don’t trust the PTO with IT, here’s yet another reason.
*davka is an Aramaic word that has entered the Hebrew lexicon in a way that could be translated as “exactly” or “precisely”, as in “They had had to take it down precisely on a Monday morning”, but those translations don’t capture the full flavor of the word – when referring to another person’s decision to do something right at that precise moment, davka carries with it a connotation (or implication) of malice on the part of the actor.