From the National Science Foundation website:
A power failure in the NSF Data Center Thursday evening caused all servers to shut down. This means that NSF IT Systems are unavailable to NSF staff and our research community of applicants and awardees. Here is what you should know: All systems and websites are down, including Research.gov, NSF.gov, and FastLane.
All deadline dates (including the CAREER program) scheduled for today will be postponed until early next week. A notice will be published on the NSF website and FastLane page when specific deadline dates have been determined.
The deadline date for proposals due on Thursday, July 21, from organizations located in the Pacific time zone and westward, whose local 5:00 pm deadline occurred after 7:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT; UTC/GMT -4 hours), will be similarly postponed until next week.
We will update this message as more information becomes available.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US $7.0 billion (fiscal year 2012), the NSF funds approximately 24% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States’ colleges and universities.[2] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.