AC 34. 2021

September 17, 2021 

Memorandum To Federal Records Management Contacts: ERA Outage Information

ERA is now operational.  As many of you are aware, ERA suffered a sustained connectivity failure due to flooding on the East Coast as a result of Hurricane Ida. This resulted in ERA being unavailable to agencies for records scheduling, transfer requests, and Annual Move actions for just over two weeks.  Due to this interruption, no schedules have been sent forward for approval by the Archivist since the outage occurred.  Approval of schedules will re-commence the week of September 20th.

While the outage has been resolved, we are seeking to avoid future sustained outages by strengthening our connectivity by pursuing options like the potential implementation of additional redundancy in our network circuits.

Please note that this extended outage is impacting the upcoming Annual Move by delaying Annual Move data preparation and testing activities.  While this does pose a risk of delaying the data load of all Annual Move Transfer Requests into the ERA Base system by October 1 as planned, we will be doing our best to get back on schedule now that system access has been restored. As we get further along in our preparations, we will send out more detailed information regarding the Annual Move and any possible delay. 

For questions about the Annual Move, please contact annual.move@nara.gov.

We regret the inconvenience this outage has caused and appreciate your patience. 

LAURENCE BREWER   
Chief Records Officer 
for the U.S. Government