Brazil's National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) published a notice at 10:38 local time on 22 September stating that some services are temporarily unavailable and that its technical team is working to restore them as soon as possible; once services are back to normal, the INPI will publish an unavailability report (Relatório de Indisponibilidade) setting out the period of the outage. At the time of writing, the INPI's technical availability portal, where system status and unavailability reports are published, was itself showing a maintenance page. This is not the first such episode this year: on 3 August the INPI likewise announced that its services were temporarily unavailable owing to a technical incident and, after restoration, published the technical unavailability report under its established procedure.
For applicants the point to watch is not the outage itself but its overlap with procedural deadlines: where a trade mark, patent or design response, an opposition, a fee payment or any other act due that day could not be completed because the systems were down, the INPI has a mechanism for restitution of the deadline (devolução de prazo) based on the unavailability report, and whether it applies depends on the window the report finally recognises and on the applicant's evidence. J&C recommends that any applicant with a Brazilian deadline on 22 September immediately keep screenshots of the error pages and the times of each attempt to log in or file, and note the act that should have been completed; once the INPI publishes the unavailability report, compare the recognised window and file a request for restitution of the deadline with that evidence within the prescribed time, rather than waiting for the report before acting and risking the deadline for the request itself.
