Dear BC Members, Please find below an ICANN announcement released yesterday. Kind Regards, Benedetta Rossi BC Secretariat https://community.icann.org/display/gnsobc/Home www.bizconst.org bc-secretariat@icann.org http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-15apr12-en.htm 15 April 2012 Statement by Akram Atallah, COO As we reported yesterday, ICANN continues to study the technical issue that has prompted us to take the TLD application system offline. Our goals remain to get a full understanding of this issue, fix the problem, notify those who have been affected, and reopen the application window as soon as possible. We are doing our best to mitigate the impact of this issue on the application process. As reported earlier, some applicants were able to see file names and user names that belonged to other applicants. An intensive review has produced no evidence that any data beyond the file names and user names could be accessed by other users. In addition, it does not appear that this issue caused any corruption or loss of data. We are currently reviewing the data to confirm which applicants were affected. As soon as the data is confirmed, we will inform all applicants whether they were affected. We are continuing to look at the technical issue and using outside experts to resolve any open issues before we reopen the application window. We are extensively testing the system to ensure that all aspects of the issue have been fully addressed. We will reopen the application system as soon as we have full confidence that the problem has been resolved. As noted in yesterday's update, we will announce no later than 23:59 GMT/UTC on Monday, 16 April, whether we will reopen on Tuesday, 17 April. 30 April remains our target date to publish the applied-for new domain names, but this is subject to change. We apologize for any concern this issue is causing. In keeping with ICANN's longstanding commitment to transparency and accountability, we will continue to provide regular updates at <http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/tas/interruption-updates> until the issue is resolved and the application window has reopened.