According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has reported on Monday that the system has been up since Friday and operated through the weekend with no known outages.
As NSSF previously reported, the outages experienced last week have been tied to the deployment of the Next Generation Identification (NGI) which replaces the legacy Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). These problems have impacted the Interstate Identification Index (III) which is a database within the NGI.
The III is one of three databases searched with every NICS transaction. When the III does not respond to the NICS queries, the NICS must be taken out of service as a complete check cannot be conducted. When the system is taken out of service, it impacts both the telephone call received (NICS Contracted Call Centers) and Internet checks conducted (NICS E-Check).
