Amicus, where did you go?

Soon after I arrived at work today I logged into Amicus, the Canadian National Catalogue, as is my practice. All seemed to be going as normal until about an hour or so into the day. All of a sudden I seemed not to be able to complete my searches, and then eventually I became unable to even access the splash page.

Assuming that this was a brief glitch I decided that I would leave it alone and come back in a few days. As I checked back during the problems were clearly still persisting.

Eventually I thought that maybe there would be an update or explanation somewhere online. Unfortunately, as the entire Library and Archives Canada site was inaccessible the most obvious location for such a notice was unavailable. In the end I tried to look in a few place, all of which turned up nothing. As I am pretty sure that there must be a message board with comments related to this occurrence I may have to continue my searching tomorrow (even though the problem has now been resolved).

Not surprisingly, with Amicus down, I decided to head over to the Library of Congress catalogue, assuming that their classifications of particular items would be pretty authoritative. Once in the catalog I learned that they too were having service problems. In this case the message I received indicated that they had reached their maximum user capacity.

While it is quite possible that this is what happened, I wonder if they were operating at diminished capacity as I have a very hard time believing that it is such a popular site that it would max out its capacity. Who knows, maybe I hit prime East coast cataloging time. As I don't use the service as much as I use Amicus I am not really in a position to say that this doesn't happen every day at that time.

Hopefully everything will be back on track tomorrow and their to serve my classification related needs.