On 9/7/2025 there was maintenance scheduled by USDA Digital Infrastructure Services Center, Enterprise Network Services. This maintenance began on 9/7 at 1000 ET and did not conclude until 12 hours later at 2200 ET. USDA Network Operations was not included in this maintenance, and it was noted during this maintenance in the emails sent days prior what this would cause. It was noted that this maintenance was only supposed to have minimal impact on USDANet locations, but on AT&T UTN locations it was going to result in extremely limited services. Four offices on the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forest are still on the AT&T UTN services, Ochoco NFSO, Deschutes SO, Awbrey Butte Radio, and Grizzly Mountain Radio. All four locations are of big importance to the forests radio operations and both NFSOs are crucial for firefighting operations.
The changes that caused this outage are being pushed to be completed before 10/1 to continue with the migration of the entire USDA off of AT&T UTN. The risks associated with these changes have been expressed by USDA Network Operations Team, especially those with legacy NRE-FS knowledge of daily operations and wildland firefighting missions, that the highest amount of due diligence is performed to understand the effect an outage of this magnitude would have on NRE-FS wildland firefighting and other emergency response procedures and implement reasonable due care to mitigate the risks.
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