OLYMPIA—Washington State’s Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) is working to restore network services after the statewide court system was taken offline on Monday, November 4, as a “precaution” to “unauthorized activity.”
“AOC is working closely with third-party partners to safely restore and test our systems and determine what, if any, impact there is to the network. There will be intermittent impacts to accessibility of the Washington Courts website and other systems in the coming days as this work continues,” Wendy Ferrell, Associate Director of the Office of Communications & Public Outreach for AOC wrote in a statement to the Lynnwood Times.
Unauthorized activity was detected early Monday morning on the Washington Courts network. AOC does not believe this was a “targeted attack” and cannot provide a timeline when the system will be back online.
“At this time, we are working as quickly as possible to restore all services,” wrote Ferrell.
Impacts to workload and operations will vary by court throughout the state during this outage. Both Marysville and Edmonds municipal courts confirmed with the Lynnwood Times that their computer systems were impacted by a statewide outage but that court sessions continued to take place.
A spokesman for the city of Lynnwood confirmed that the Lynnwood Municipal Court was also impacted by the outage.
Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts manages the entire judicial system for the state—Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Superior Courts, Courts of Limited Jurisdiction, Administrative Office of the Courts, Office of Public Defense, and Office of Civil Legal Aid. As of the publication of this article, the courts.wa.gov website is still down.
Article updated 3:46 p.m., November 5, 2024, with confirmation of Lynnwood Court system impact to outage.
Author: Mario Lotmore
