Full access to the Lattes platform was restored on Saturday evening, according to a statement by the CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) (7).
In the document, the competent authority stated that the system is working again, making it possible to update curricula and register new users. The note also states that the service for extracting the researchers’ resumes has already been restored.
A tech outage has left Lattes and the Carlos Chagas platform offline since July 23.
CNPq is responsible for both systems, an agency affiliated with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which is responsible for promoting research in the country.
According to official information, the system failure was caused by the burning of a device in devices that has the function of controlling the servers on which the platforms are hosted. This would have occurred when migrating the data to a new server.
In an email received from Folha on the 26th, a CNPq official reported that the community’s main server had been attacked and that the devices were out of warranty and without a maintenance contract. This would prevent an immediate repair and would involve the need to hire an outside company as it actually happened.
When asked by Folha, CNPq and the Ministry of Science did not reply that the operation is without warranty and maintenance.
On August 3, after ten days of power failure, Jair Bolsonaro’s government restored partial access to the platform. At this point it was not possible to update the resumes, but it was possible to print and download them.
Lattes is a database of the résumés of all researchers and actions such as grant awarding depend on the platform’s consultation. On the other hand, Carlos Chagas is responsible for running public calls and announcements to promote research, manage and pay out grants.
Officials point to the failure as a reflection of the budget contraction the CNPq is experiencing, but this was rejected by the board chairman.
In 2021, the agency has the lowest budget since at least 2012, also in nominal terms. The Agency’s updated budget allocation for the year is R $ 1.2 billion – for example, between 2013 and 2015 the implemented budget exceeded R $ 2 billion.