For those of us who have embraced – and perhaps take for granted – the ease and convenience of filing documents online with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the last two days have been trying ones. All systems of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, including the Trademark Database as well as the Online Filing Portal, were offline from late in the afternoon on September 30th, until earlier this morning, October 2nd. (Even now, the site seems a little shaky: pages load properly one minute and are unavailable the next.)

Recently released trade-mark statistics (which we blogged about a few months back) indicate that just over 45,000 applications were filed in the last twelve-month period for which stats are available. Of these, 90% were filed online. Crunching the numbers, that works out to be approximately 110 applications filed online, each day.

Considering this, it is probably only a small number of applicants, then, that have been directly affected by the outage. However, when one considers the other electronic functionality which CIPO has recently made available online (including the recently released e-registration services which allow online credit card payment for Declarations of Use, Extensions of Time and Registration fees), along with the wildly popular Trade-marks Database, this service interruption has likely impacted a significant number of users.

Though the situation seems to be sorting itself out, it is worth remembering that when the online systems are unavailable, deadlines continue to run. Correspondents are advised to submit all necessary documentation to CIPO by hand, through Canada Post via Registered Mail or, where the nature of the filing permits it, via facsimile. Further discussion of the proper procedures to follow in such circumstances can be found on CIPO’s Emergency Procedures page.