Pai Says FCC 'Moving Forward' on ECFS Revamp, Addresses OIG DDoS Investigation

in July in response to problems the ECFS application programming interface experienced during a proceeding on rescinding 2015 net neutrality rules (see 1807110044). The FCC “expects that the Discovery/Requirements phase of the ECFS Replacement project will start in the first quarter of FY 2019,” Pai said in response to a query from Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif. Once that phase ends, “we will have a more accurate timeline for ECFS development. The estimated development time is six to nine months.” The FCC plans to give Congress “quarterly briefings” on progress, Pai said. He emphasized he was following an Office of Inspector General’s request not to divulge results of its investigation into the ECFS incident ahead of the final report’s August release. OIG found the glitch was caused by sheer volume of commenters on net neutrality rather than a distributed denial-of-service attack (see 1808060051). OIG didn’t want commissioners to discuss the investigation “in order not to jeopardize it,” including “the referral of facts involving [then-FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray’s] conduct to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution,” Pai said. “In the days and weeks following the incident, my office had several conversations with [Bray] and other Commission IT personnel to better understand what had happened, help answer questions regarding what had happened, and take steps to keep ECFS running.” FCC IT staffers have since “improved caching both internally, within the ECFS system, and externally, leveraging our Content Delivery Network provider,” Pai said. Staff “enhanced ECFS both vertically (using ‘larger’ instances with more memory and CPU capacity) and horizontally (adding additional instances to the various clusters) to deal with the increased volume of requests.” The FCC “optimized the ECFS application both in terms of data access and application functions,” Pai said.