Update - June 18, 2025 12:35PM EDT
While there are items that are appearing in the Daily Business section of FCC.today, the links may point to the FCC's EDOCS page with a message "The document you requested is not yet available in this system." or in some cases, may point to a very old document. We are aware of this.
In the past, we used the EDOCS Application Processing Interface (API) to obtain the data for this section. The FCC recently made some changes to their server that now make us unable to retrieve the data (see the Original Report below). Our workaround uses the existing functionality in our Drupal content management system that is used for the main recnet.com content website to retrieve the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed that the agency provides for document (daily business) releases. Therefore, we are now using a different data source in order to try to get the same data.
We have noticed that with the RSS feed, the information about the documents appear there before they appear in the main EDOCS system. I am guessing that there is some kind of approval process internally before the document can be made public and the RSS feed beats that approval. Therefore, the RSS shows references to documents which have not yet been made public.
For now, we can only recommend that if you experience this message, to try again later in the day.
There may be times where you have seen links to very old documents show up on fcc.today. This is also an FCC issue. We experienced this also when our old functionality still worked. We are addressing this by filtering out entries that come in on the RSS feed that have very old document IDs.
We have also added to the desktop version, a direct link to the FCC's Daily Business releases. This was the same link we had during the time when the Daily Business functionality was not working on fcc.today. This link has always existed on the mobile version.
Update - June 17, 2025 9:08AM EDT
We have moved the data source from the EDOCS API to an RSS feed provided by the FCC. This will also address an additional issue where Media Bureau and REC Substack items at the top of the fcc.today page were not updating. That issue was caused by REC moving the recnet.com Drupal content management to a separate server to improve system performance. The two new solutions added will import the Drupal news aggregator data from the content server (recnet.com) to the data server (fcc.today).
With the new solution, there may be up to a 20 minute delay for a daily business item to reach fcc.today.
Original Report - May 23, 2025 8:40AM EDT
This is a user reported bug. No information is returning from the FCC EDOCS API using either curl or PHP file_get_contents. Displays OK when displaying the JSON directly on a browser (Chrome/Windows).
REC uses this data from the API in order to display the latest FCC documents and news items on our site fcc.today.
Verbose output from CURL (using HTTP version 2):
* Trying 23.201.175.203:443...
* Connected to www.fcc.gov (23.201.175.203) port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering h2
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
* CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* SSL connection using TLSv1.3 / TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
* ALPN, server accepted to use h2
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=District of Columbia; L=Washington; O=Federal Communications Commission; CN=www.fcc.gov
* start date: Oct 5 00:00:00 2024 GMT
* expire date: Oct 8 23:59:59 2025 GMT
* subjectAltName: host "www.fcc.gov" matched cert's "www.fcc.gov"
* issuer: C=US; O=DigiCert Inc; OU=www.digicert.com; CN=GeoTrust RSA CA 2018
* SSL certificate verify ok.
* Using HTTP2, server supports multiplexing
* Connection state changed (HTTP/2 confirmed)
* Copying HTTP/2 data in stream buffer to connection buffer after upgrade: len=0
* Using Stream ID: 1 (easy handle 0x5628956bd2b0)
> GET /api/content.json/?limit=100&rec=20250522517&created_after=2025-05-22&page=0 HTTP/2
Host: www.fcc.gov
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EDOCS/2.0; +https://recnet.com/eLMS-info)
accept: */*
* old SSL session ID is stale, removing
* HTTP/2 stream 0 was not closed cleanly: INTERNAL_ERROR (err 2)
* stopped the pause stream!
* Connection #0 to host www.fcc.gov left intact
CURL attempt forcing HTTP version 1.1:
* Trying 23.201.175.203:443...
* Connected to www.fcc.gov (23.201.175.203) port 443 (#0)
* ALPN, offering http/1.1
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
* CApath: /etc/ssl/certs
* SSL connection using TLSv1.3 / TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384
* ALPN, server accepted to use http/1.1
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=District of Columbia; L=Washington; O=Federal Communications Commission; CN=www.fcc.gov
* start date: Oct 5 00:00:00 2024 GMT
* expire date: Oct 8 23:59:59 2025 GMT
* subjectAltName: host "www.fcc.gov" matched cert's "www.fcc.gov"
* issuer: C=US; O=DigiCert Inc; OU=www.digicert.com; CN=GeoTrust RSA CA 2018
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET /api/content.json/?limit=100&rec=20250522532&created_after=2025-05-22&page=0 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.fcc.gov
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EDOCS/2.0; +https://recnet.com/eLMS-info)
Accept: */*
* old SSL session ID is stale, removing
and then hangs from there...
NOTE: The passed parameter &rec= is generated on our side in order to force new content as opposed to chaching. This parameter is ignored by the FCC server. Our attempts to pass the URL without the &rec= parameter returns the same results.
REC made no changes on our side prior to the start of this incident.
We are suspecting that the issue is on the FCC side, likely due to a change in the server configuration. The issue was first noticed on May 19, 2025.
REC is currently exploring options to remedy the situation. No ETU.
