The Washington courts network was affected by a cyberattack that led to a statewide outage, the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) announced.
According to statements on Facebook and LinkedIn, the outage was caused by unauthorized activity and prompted AOC to “secure critical systems”.
“Please be advised that there will be intermittent impacts to accessibility of our public website and systems in the coming days as we continue to restore services. We apologize for any inconvenience,” AOC said.
According to a Pierce County statement, the outage started on Sunday, affecting court operations across the state. Both the District Court and Superior Court in Pierce County were impacted.
“The outage has limited some services, though essential functions and most proceedings are expected to continue with minimal interruption,” the county said on Sunday.
On Monday, the Pierce County Clerk of Superior Court’s Office announced service interruptions caused by the outage, including impact on electronic court record searches, and on balance information regarding judgments and fines that are owed.
The Clerk’s Office also notified the public that it would remain open during regular business hours and that access to its online services was still available.
On Monday, an AOC official said that there was no reason to believe that the cyberattack was a targeted one, but did not provide additional details on the outage, citing security reasons, The Seattle Times reports.
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The official also said that systems were taken down in an abundance of caution and that work has started on restoring the affected systems.
All the websites and associated services of all state courts and municipal courts that rely on the state’s case management systems are affected. Courts that have their own management systems are not impacted.