Electronic connectivity problems at the registry

We've encountered some connectivity problems during the past 48 hours. Yesterday at about noon, the MassLandRecords website became inaccessible to users. The same outage knocked out our electronic recording capability. Everything within the registry continued to work fine so we were able to record walk-in documents and mail and search the database on our public access computers, but offsite business was shut down for nearly three hours. The IT people at the Secretary of State's office and associated contractors resolved the problem. I'm still not sure what caused it. We resumed full operations at about 2:30 pm so we were out of business for about 2.5 hours.

Today we had a different problem. At about 9:15 am we got error message on all of our computers. They had "lost" the connection with the server that runs our land management software (recording, search, etc). The error resolved itself in only about 4 minutes but it's the second time it has happened. The other was on October 20 which again lasted for only a few minutes. We're not sure what caused these two outages but are concerned that the are indicators that some switch or cable on our internal network may be starting to fail. We've asked the IT people to dig into it to try to preempt a bigger outage.

Because so much of our operations have shifted to electronics, an electrical outage or computer problem have a major impact on us. We could always shift back to a paper-based system but that would only be done with a multi-day outage.