In brief: A licensing issue in the interface software of servers operated by the state-owned IT service provider ITDZ has rendered Berlin’s judiciary completely unable to function since Monday morning at 6:30 a.m.
Since Monday morning, judges and staff at Berlin’s criminal and civil courts have been unable to access their servers. The result is a total failure of electronic file processing and communications throughout the city’s entire judicial apparatus.
The IT infrastructure of Berlin’s courts has been inaccessible since Monday morning at 6:30 a.m. The problem affects all district courts, the Moabit criminal court, both regional courts and the Berlin Court of Appeal. Staff members and judges cannot log into the servers of the state-owned IT service provider ITDZ, which prevents them from accessing electronic files, processing cases, or reading emails. The Senate Justice Administration attributes the problem to a licensing issue in the interface software required for server access.
The impact is considerable. All staff members were sent home at midday. Judges must resort to pen and paper and conduct hearings without files. The situation is particularly critical in criminal proceedings: according to Stefan Schifferdecker of the German Judges Association, there is a risk that statutory detention deadlines cannot be met; in the worst case, suspects must be released from pre-trial detention. The ITDZ announced by email at midday that the problem had been identified – yet in reality, the disruptions persisted into the early evening.
The outage is not isolated. Justice circles have been reporting problems with the IT system for weeks; just on Friday there were outages lasting hours. Berlin’s judiciary is signaling skepticism about whether normal work will be possible on Tuesday. The Berlin regional branch of the New Judges Association demands an “immediate and sustainable stabilization of justice IT” and emphasizes: a functioning electronic filing system is not a matter of convenience, but a fundamental prerequisite for a functioning rule of law.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 14 July 2026
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