CYBERSPACE — Temporarily Disabled. That’s the message you get if you try to search a specific carrier’s status on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) new CSA website.

The website went down just a day after the FMCSA officially put CSA into effect.

You can get the info if you know the carrier’s DOT or Motor Carrier Number, but if you’re searching by company name in the hopes of finding out, for example, how many OSS violations a carrier has – well, no luck.

The system’s too bogged down to handle your request.

The FMCSA went live Sunday with the new CSA Safety Measurement system, the database containing carriers’ scores in CSA’s seven Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories. (BASICS).

A day later, the site was so jammed with carriers trying to see what the database held, the system slowed down to a crawl, sometime stalling completely.

According to truckinginfo.com, one reason for the slowdown is that visitors tried to download the entire database incorrectly.

The website offers a "download" feature but according to an FMCSA spokesman, carriers were using an automated system called "web scraping," which tied up the technology, thereby disabling it.

It’s hardly surprising. The CSA system has been hobbled by glitches both legal and technical since it was announced in 2009. It was originally called CSA 2010 and was supposed to be up and running this past summer.

Now it’s called just CSA, which stands for Compliance, Safety and Accountability. (It was formerly titled Comprehensive Safety Analysis – try to keep up).

Interested parties can go to csa.fmcsa.dot.gov and search for carrier scores. But good luck with that for now.

The supposed opening of the BASICs data came just two days after a federal appeals court rejected a plea by several carrier groups to keep the data private for now.

As of Tuesday morning, the CSA main website was running at normal speed. But the search by name function still didn’t work.