South Africa's Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) has issued Notice 49 of 2026 announcing scheduled maintenance of all CIPC systems and services from 17:00 on Friday 25 September until 07:00 on Monday 28 September. The CIPC states that during this period no applications and services will be available, and apologises for the inconvenience. Because the CIPC administers company registrations as well as trade marks, patents and designs, the window covers electronic filing, responses, renewals and searches for trade marks, patents and designs, together with company matters.
This is a clearly timed planned shutdown rather than an outage, so the response is correspondingly simple: bring forward any act that falls inside or right next to the window. J&C recommends that anyone with a South African trade mark, patent or design deadline falling between 25 September and 28 September, or shortly after, complete electronic filings within priority periods, renewals, responses to examination reports and opposition papers before 17:00 on 25 September and keep the filing receipts; where a deadline expires during the downtime and it is unclear whether it will be extended, act on the earliest date rather than counting on filing after the systems return.
