[dharmab]

My sibling is a molecular biologist working in the industry and they do use BLAST data. She's been telling her company for months they need to secure access with an alternative source or offline backup, hopefully their software team started it in time.

[wisidisi]

Everyone can set-up their own blast database. Usually if you are specialized on a certain species you have your own DB cached in memory somewhere locally for efficiency. Also there are alternatives. NCBI blast is just one of many. Also all the sequences are globally kept and in sync in different regions of the world, so if one Datacenter goes down you still have the option to use the exact same data from Europe or Japan and so on.

[dharmab]

Yup, her company's software was set up to only use NCBI and she's been warning that that was a risk :)