Dear Birck Research Community, Agilent Technologies, the supplier of our iLabs reservation and billing software, has notified us of a planned iLabs outage beginning on Friday, May 7 at 9:00 pm and lasting into the weekend. Originally they had planned for a 12-hour outage but recent indications are that it could take longer, maybe up to 48 hours. During this time iLabs will be unusable and unavailable. We are faced with two scenarios for dealing with this: 1. Keep all instrument interlocks activated and then no tools will be available until the outage is concluded, or 2. Open all the interlocks, strongly encourage reservations to be made in advance of the 9:00 pm May 7th shut down, and bill fur use according to the pre-arranged reservations. Also, if walk-up use is done during the outage the user should email the tool owner to notify them about the unreserved use so that proper billings can occur for these cases. We choose to follow Option B, asking for everyone who needs tools this weekend to reserve them in iLabs before 9:00 pm on May 7th if at all possible. We feel this is the best option considering our facility has been down this week for routine preventive maintenance activities, and users are waiting to get access to the tools again. Please follow our guidance for Option B, using pre-reservations and walk-ups while the iLabs system is offline. As soon as they’re finished with their outage we will reactivate the interlocks back to normal operation. Thanks for your cooperation, Ron