Website outages and upgrades

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) makes upgrades to this website from time to time, to improve user experience. During these upgrades, the website is unavailable for a short period of time, outside of EMA working hours. This page lists when we are planning the next outage and the main improvements made.

Planned interruptions

Date	Time	Availability
13/05/2024	08:00-09:00 CET	Website intermittently unavailable
28/05/2024	08:00-09:00 CET	Website intermittently unavailable
25/06/2024	08:00-09:00 CET	Website intermittently unavailable
30/07/2024	08:00-09:00 CET	Website intermittently unavailable
27/08/2024	08:00-09:00 CET	Website intermittently unavailable

During these times, EMA’s corporate website may be intermittently unavailable or not work optimally. When the website is unavailable, a holding page displays EMA’s contact details, including the emergency number for reporting a potentially serious problem with a centrally authorised medicine and the number for notifying EMA of suspected quality defects or product recalls.

EMA advises users not to plan complex or critical work using EMA's corporate website at these times.

Release notes

• 15/04/2024:
  • Fixed issue with multi-day all-day events displaying on the homepage and in the events listing page
  • Fixed issue with “First published” date displaying also as the “Last updated” date for documents that have not been updated after initial publication
  • Improved usability of document display by adding the publication and update dates of each available translation separately
  • Improved usability of veterinary referrals by grouping documents by stage at publishing e.g. at under evaluation or final decision stage
  • Various back-end bug fixes and improvements
• 20/03/2024:
  • Improved usability and accessibility of 'Page contents' links by including the name of the bookmark in the URL
  • Fixed issue with related content sections not showing in the 'Page contents' of Opinions on medicines for use outside EU and Paediatric investigation plans
  • Improved usability of Opinions on medicines for use outside EU by moving the ‘Product information’ section up on the page and by ensuring the document ’Procedural steps taken and scientific information after opinion’ always displays first under ‘Assessment history’
  • Various back-end bug fixes and improvements
• 06/03/2024:
  • Back-end improvement to the search interface of authenticity verification for electronic certificates
• 29/02/2024:
  • Pause button added to the homepage carousel
  • Search improved by:
    • implementation of a spinning loader indicator to provide the user feedback that the browser is processing the request
    • ability to select more than one item from a search filter (search results will display results with either criteria, e.g. if A and B are selected from one single filter, results will include content that is either for A or B)
  • Search results display improved by:
    • default order set to newest first
    • implementation of a message with a link to the search tips page
    • bug fixed affecting the display of metadata related to content
  • Breadcrumbs on event pages updated to include a link to the events listing
  • Display of various special characters fixed
  • Deactivated glossary terms from document titles
  • Bugs fixed on the European experts page which displayed the top of the page when pagination or search within the list was used lower down on the page; search for names with special characters improved
• 31/01/2024:
  • Fixed issue with missing URL redirections from the previous version of the website, in particular for medicine content and documents (excluding URLs of documents in languages other than English)
• 11/01/2024:
  • Search results relevance improved, by increasing the amount of content on each web page indexed by sitewide search
  • Bug fixed in sitewide search (error message displayed when searching for documents with titles longer than 128 characters)
  • Searching and filtering enabled in sitewide search for:
    • medicines by type (biosimilar, generic, etc.), opinion status, maximum residue limits
    • referrals by therapeutic area
    • shortages by status
    • direct healthcare professional communications (DHPCs) by active substance, international non-proprietary name (INN) and common name
    • paediatric investigation plans (PIPs) by active substance, INN, common name and therapeutic area
    • periodic safety update report single assessments (PSUSAs) by regulatory outcome and active substance/INN
  • Usability improved of controlled vocabulary filter for therapeutic area in the sitewide search, by listing terms in alphabetic order
  • Bug fixed that prevented users from seeing upcoming events and past events
  • Language identifiers for Icelandic (íslenska) and Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba) in document lists corrected
• 05/12/2023:
  • New version of the website with increased security
  • All content migrated from previous version of the website
  • Refreshed look and feel, enhancing use of visual products
  • Simplified navigation via a 'breadcrumbs' feature showing users where they are on the website
  • Simplified medicines search via either medicine name or active substance
  • Revamped 'What's new page', enabling users to locate content via simple filters and new sorting options