Lehigh Valley Live (Rudy Miller) reports, citing this Pennsylvania State Police press release:

Technology challenges and a surge in requests resulted in PICS twice going offline on March 17, 2020. An isolated server issue was responsible for the morning outage from 8:00 to 11:30 a.m. The second outage happened between 5:00 and 8:40 p.m., due to a backlog of requests.

Despite the downtime, PICS completed 4,342 transactions on March 17, compared to 1,359 transactions on the corresponding Tuesday in March 2019. Transactions include background checks for purchases, transfers, evidence returns, and license to carry applications.

The Pennsylvania State Police is working with its vendor to increase processing power to avoid future backlogs and will adjust staffing as needed to meet demand. Rumors circulating on social media that PICS has been shutdown as part of the commonwealth's response to the COVID-19 epidemic are false. PICS is, and will remain, operational.

We regret any inconvenience yesterday's downtime caused to licensed firearm dealers and their customers.