SEWP's off: Power failure briefly shutters NASA's tech contract

A power failure at the suburban Washington, D.C., building housing NASA's Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement contract vehicle knocked out service for up to two days.

NASA is working to working to restore operations within 24 hours.

Joanne Woytek, program manager at SEWP, said technical staff had been testing a "fail-over facility" for SEWP's operations the Saturday before the outage struck.

"The technical staff working on that fail-over facility are focused on finalizing the remaining issues, and there is a possibility of switching to that system later today," she said on Feb. 25.  "So we are working to have full functionality restored within 24 hours and possibly much sooner."

The almost-completed High Availability System being tested has been in the works for the last year, she said. If the system had been implemented before the failure, it would have automatically switched the live system to a backup at another location. SEWP is putting the final network adjustments on that system.

"We recognize the importance of having a fully operational system available at all times for both government and industry and regret that we had not been able to complete the testing in time to prevent this shutdown.  After this week, we will have that backup functioning and be able to avoid any similar loss of service in the future," she said.

In the meantime, SEWP is reaching out to its contract holders to allow them to respond to requests for quotes, as well as to its government customers about the power outage. Additionally, SEWP's phone systems and help line are still operational.