Well, considering that the entire oclc.org website was down, the OCLC system alerts web page would not have been of any help for this recent outage.

When this occurred, what I did is check here:

This reported that it was not just me, the site was down for everyone. If all would do this, then at most someone could pass on the useful information that the site is down for all and they have investigated it with OCLC and here is what the response was.

What is not useful is the question “Is anyone else having a problem with OCLC” and then dozens of replies “Yes” or “No” – none of those people replying can help you. Only OCLC can do that.

I didn’t bother contacting OCLC myself because I knew that such a major interruption would not go unnoticed.

Michael Fitzgerald
Electronic Services Librarian
Learning Resources Division
University of the District of Columbia
4200 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20008
phone: 202-274-6387
fax: 202-274-6012