FamilySearch Website Down June 27th, 2016

The following notice began appearing on the FamilySearch.org website recently.

The notice reads as follows:

The FamilySearch website will be undergoing a technical upgrade Monday, June 27th starting at 12:00 am MDT (6:00 am UTC) and may be down for up to 24 hours as we test the system.

One of the common issues with the FamilySearch.org website is that it slows down or stops working during periods of high usage. In fact, use of the website far exceeds the capacity it was initially designed to handle. I have heard from several different sources that the scheduled maintenance addresses the issue of expanding the capacity and increasing the speed of access to the website. This will be a welcome change. As noted, the outage may last for 24 hours or more. So those of us who are glued to the website every day, will just have to take a short one-day vacation and work on other things for a while.