You may find BankIt and/or Submission Portal unavailable. NCBI staff occasionally do perform site maintenance that require taking web-based GenBank submission tools off line. Such outages generally last a few hours. We schedule them in advance and we post banners announcing the events on the tools’ home pages.
If you continue seeing ‘unavailable’ messages for multiple days following the maintenance, your browser may be sending you to an old page. In technical terms, your Domain Name Service (DNS) resolving server has stored ("cached") an old value for the www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov site.
Try these ways to fix the problem:
- Clear your browser’s cache, close and restart the browser
- Use a different browser (see the NCBI browser guidance)
- If you have bookmarked the BankIt page (or saved it as favorite), remove the bookmark. Start anew with this URL (web address) in your browser to access BankIt: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/WebSub/?tool=genbank
If the problem continues, consider addressing your DNS resolution problem. If you are accessing NCBI from within an institution, contact your internet technology (IT) specialist for help.