An outage of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) adversely affected many retailers and consumers on Black Friday.
NSSF has been in contact with FBI-NICS staff, who explained that the outage was attributable to a computer glitch that overloaded the system. A short-term fix has been applied to the system and once the holiday season is over, a long-term fix will be completed.
Black Friday was the second highest day for NICS activity for non-point-of-contact states and partial-point-of-contact states. It was the third busiest day overall for NICS with more than 87,000 checks being conducted.
NICS officials were exceedingly apologetic for the unscheduled outage.