Overview
- A city-wide IT failure stopped judges and staff from logging into court servers on Monday, forcing the closure or postponement of hearings and sending many employees home.
- Authorities and ITDZ identified a licensing/interface problem tied to a recent software update as the trigger and restored access by rolling back the update or restarting older systems.
- Courtrooms resorted to handwritten workarounds, including manual detention orders, which raised urgent concerns that statutory deadlines for pretrial detention could be missed and suspects might have to be released.
- Judges and court associations have long reported recurring outages and a recent server migration, and senior court officials had warned the justice senate days earlier about a looming collapse of the IT service.
- The incident exposes weaknesses in Berlin’s stalled E‑Akte rollout and has increased pressure on the Senat and ITDZ to fix change management, licensing and contingency plans so ordinary court work can run reliably.