23 January 2019

Ministry of Justice

Network access was restored to circa 180 MoJ sites on Tuesday as the ministry worked with Microsoft and Atos to find alternative ways to access the network. These included rerouting traffic and installing additional capacity.

The ministry has reiterated that the problems, which saw legal practitioners unable to send or receive messages through the government’s secure criminal justice email system, were not caused by malicious cyberactivity and that, so far, no data has been lost.

A spokesperson for the MoJ said the urgent work carried out by all parties concerned has led to improvements, but work is ongoing with contingency plans in place.

“While services have continued to operate and alternative network is in place for most, we know how frustrating this is for anyone affected and we are disappointed that our suppliers haven’t yet been able to resolve the network problems in full,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to work with them to return services to normal.”

The IT failure comes as the government is in the process of spending £1bn to modernise the courts system by making as much information possible available electronically. However, the ministry said the network failures are unrelated.