To the editor:
Monday was the first time in my tenure as Register of Deeds that we were not able to record documents for the entire day.
In addition, our website was down, preventing any searches of our records. The long and short of it is we had unprecedented computer failures that brought the system down. As the old saying goes, “the buck stops here,” and it just stopped.
Thankfully, with the assistance of the staff at Secretary of State William Galvin’s Information Technology (IT) HelpDesk, the Registry IT staff, and our software vendor, AIT, we are back up and running.
We’re happy to report that all documents submitted through eRecording or brought into the registry on Monday were on record by Tuesday at noon and all of Tuesday’s submissions made it on record before the end of the day.
This was possible due to our dedicated staff at the Registry. I appreciate all of their hard work.
The Registry staff are working in conjunction with AIT and the Secretary’s IT staff to develop a business-continuity plan to ensure that outages never again occur on the scale that occurred on Monday.
We plan to make use of modern and secure technology that will reliably and safely allow us to work around local issues should the need arise. It has been submitted to the Secretary’s IT team; we hope it will be approved and ready for implementation soon.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. Please know that we understand the havoc caused by the outage on Monday and we are making every effort to prevent it from happening again.
John, L. O’Brien
Register of Deeds
Southern Essex District
