Recovery efforts for the Labor Day outage and affected documents have been completed. If you received notice from us and have not yet taken action, please complete your document update requests before November 30, 2019. The requests to update documents will be removed from your OSCAR homepage on December 1, 2019.
On September 20, 2019 the following email was sent to recommenders and law school administrators who were affected by the outage providing instructions on action needed to restore their recommendation letters.
Dear OSCAR User,
The Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR) is hosted outside of the federal judiciary by Amazon Web Services (AWS). On August 31, 2019, there was a catastrophic power failure to the AWS East Coast Region datacenter that affected the OSCAR system servers. The system was back online shortly thereafter; however, the unprecedented service outage affected OSCAR applications submitted between June 7, 2019 and August 31, 2019. Although all submitted applications are available in OSCAR, some attachments are missing.
You are receiving this message because letters of recommendation that you previously uploaded to the OSCAR system have been affected by the recent technical issues that occurred. Despite significant work by our vendor to recover the affected documents, we regret to inform you that you will need to upload new versions of some letters of recommendation that you uploaded between June 7, 2019 and August 31, 2019. To assist in this process, our vendor has reset any affected recommendation requests that were completed back to pending status. This will allow you to restore only the recommendation requests that were affected by following the same steps you previously followed to complete the recommendation requests (visit the Recommender Resource Page or see step-by-step instructions for more information).
All law schools and affected applicants have been notified of the recent technical issues. Affected law schools have also been given a copy of this notification.
We apologize for the inconvenience. We are working with our system vendor to implement additional safeguards to ensure this situation does not occur in the future. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact the OSCAR Program Office at 1-866-666-2120 (toll free) or email oscar-support@ao.uscourts.gov.
On September 19, 2019 the following email was sent to law school administrators and applicants who were affected by the outage providing instructions on action needed to restore their application documents.
Dear OSCAR User,
You are receiving this message because applicants from your school (see attached list of applicants)/your applications and/or application documents were affected by the recent technical issues experienced by the OSCAR system. This message is an update to previous communications regarding the recent OSCAR system outage and resulting technical issues.
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) wants to thank you for your patience and understanding as we worked to recover from a significant technical issue in OSCAR with our system vendor. The relationship among the federal judiciary, law schools, and potential future judiciary employees is very important to us.
As of today, all affected documents that could be automatically recovered were restored. The AO worked with our system vendor to recover the following documents that were rendered inaccessible during this incident:
Despite these intensive recovery efforts, our vendor could not recover all affected documents. Remaining affected documents will require applicants to upload a new document and update their applications manually. To facilitate this process, our vendor implemented a system update that identifies these documents.
This update allows affected applicants to view which applications and their associated documents need to be updated from their OSCAR home page upon login. To upload new application documents and update applications:
As a reminder, these update requests were generated by the system, not a judge, and they do not imply a judge’s interest in any specific application. Some judges may have already completed their hiring (and as we previously communicated, judges were able to access all documents until August 31, and thereafter would be aware, for each application, of any specific documents that had been submitted but had become inaccessible).
The AO is also notifying all recommenders who had recommendation letters that were not able to be recovered. Their notification email will contain step-by-step instructions to reattach the recommendation letters. In addition, law schools have been notified and can coordinate with their affected faculty recommenders on the uploading of recommendation letters. All law schools are also receiving a copy of this message.
In order to facilitate any judges or staff attorney offices that are still in the process of making hiring decisions, the AO will inform them to expect most applications to be fully restored and ready for review by the end of next week. Please review and update your applications accordingly.
Maintaining OSCAR data safely and securely is a high priority for us as it is for you, and our expectations were not met on this occasion. We are continuing our review of what went wrong, as well as how we can better avoid this or any similar incident in the future. We hope to share those explanations with you in the near future. Our vendor has released this service bulletin related to the incident. In the meantime, the AO again apologizes for any inconvenience and confusion these recent technical issues have caused to you.
On September 12, 2019, the following email was sent to all OSCAR applicants that were affected by the OSCAR outage and the issues with missing application documents.
Please Note: This post was edited from the original email in order to reduce confusion about the positions impacted by the technical issues. The incorrect phrase has been indicated in strikethrough.
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) manages the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR). A private vendor that services the system experienced a major power failure on August 31, 2019. Unfortunately, electronic versions of some application documents you submitted between June 7, 2019 to August 31, 2019 to clerkship and staff attorney positions were rendered inaccessible after this incident due to a failure of several backup systems.
We are working with our vendors to recover many of the affected documents and working to make your applications as whole as possible. The system vendor is making significant progress on the restoration efforts including a capability to upload new documents to "Filled" or "Expired" positions, but work is ongoing. We anticipate sending another email by early next week with instructions you can follow to replace any documents that cannot be recovered.
Judges who posted positions between June 7, 2019, and August 31, 2019 (the affected postings) have been notified. Please note that prior to August 31, 2019, all OSCAR applications and all their supporting documents had been available to all judges for their review. At this time, judges can still view all applications, as well as those supporting documents not affected by the outage, and judges will be aware of which supporting documents are missing (if any) from any application they are currently viewing. Judges have a clear process to receive any updated documents they may require as part of their decision-making process.
The AO has also been in regular contact with your law school, and we encourage you to reach out to your career services office or the OSCAR support team if you need assistance or have questions.
We apologize for any inconvenience or anxiety this has caused you. We also understand the high importance applicants, recommenders, and judges place on the security of materials associated with clerkship applications. This loss of data is unacceptable to us as well, and while our primary focus right now is on speedy recovery, we also will investigate the reasons for the failure and how to lower future risks. We will continue to update you via email and the OSCAR website as more information becomes available. Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.
On September 10, 2019 the following email was sent to all law school administrators to provide an update on the OSCAR outage and the efforts to recover missing application documents.
Dear Law School Administrator,
This email serves as an update to inform you that the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) is continuing to work with our OSCAR system vendor on recovery efforts for application documents affected by the recent system outage. The system vendor is seeking to recover grade sheets and other documents created via the online editor in an effort to minimize impact to our users.
Judges who had posted positions between June 7, 2019 and August 31, 2019 (the affected postings) have been notified. Please note that prior to August 31, 2019, all OSCAR applications and all their supporting documents had been available to all judges for their review. At this time, judges can still view all applications, as well as those supporting documents not affected by the outage, and judges will be aware of which supporting documents are missing (if any) from any application they are currently viewing. When judges contact us regarding any missing supporting documents, we are instructing them to request a document update through OSCAR to obtain new versions of any affected documents from the applicant.
We anticipate sending another email by early next week with a list of your school's affected applicants and the instructions they can follow to replace any documents that cannot be recovered.
We understand the confusion and inconvenience this situation continues to cause and are working very hard to limit the impact on your applicants and recommenders.
We will continue to update you via email and the OSCAR website as more information becomes available. Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.
Law school students and graduates who filed applications for federal court clerkships and staff attorney positions from June 7 to Aug. 31, 2019 using the OSCAR system may have to refile some documents in their applications. Affected applicants will be sent notifications and instructions for refiling this week.
Documents filed during that period may have been affected by a major power failure at one of the Judiciary's service providers. The electrical outage affected the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR), which is used to process clerkship and staff attorney applications. The OSCAR system is back up and running.
Only applications filed during the period June 7 to Aug. 31 were affected. Judges and staff attorney offices that accepted applications through the OSCAR system during this period also are being notified.