Our world and the technologies we use are changing rapidly. As such, the information technology used by the Federal Communications Commission must change as well. Over the past year, we have made significant progress to upgrade and modernize our infrastructure, and we continue to work on modernizing the FCC’s legacy IT systems with the resources we have available.

Over the Labor Day Weekend, the FCC IT Team will be working to upgrade and modernize the FCC’s legacy infrastructure. Starting Wednesday, September 2nd at 6pm EDT, interactive public-facing web applications hosted at the FCC will not be available. We will work to have these web applications upgraded and available again by the morning of 8am EDT on Tuesday, September 8th.

These web applications will include our Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), Electronic Document Management System (EDOCS), Universal Licensing System (ULS), National Broadband Map, and other public-facing applications. Static content web pages under the www.fcc.gov domain, like the FCC’s consumer guides, should remain available during this period.

Of note, our cloud-based FCC Consumer Help Desk, recently modernized to a Software as a Service (SaaS) option, will continue to operate uninterrupted. It is our goal to modernize more of the FCC’s legacy IT to SaaS and other cloud-based platform options going forward. This modernization is more flexible, secure and resilient, as well as more cost effective compared to the costs of maintaining on-premise IT solutions.

We understand that this temporary downtime before and during the Labor Day Weekend may be inconvenient for some FCC stakeholders; however, we have taken a number of steps to mitigate this wherever possible. For example, filing deadlines for all Commission proceedings that happen to fall during the affected time period will automatically be extended; more specific details can be found in a Public Notice here.

This work effort over the Labor Day Weekend is the latest in a series of on-going work to improve the FCC’s legacy IT systems, reduce how much we spend on our legacy infrastructure, and improve public engagement with the Commission. The entire FCC IT Team thanks you for your support and understanding.