14 DAY TRIAL // Several websites of the US federal court system, including the ones of the United States Courts (uscourts.gov) and Public Access to Court Electronic Records (pacer.gov), were disrupted on Friday afternoon after being hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
Many other federal court websites have also suffered outages due to the cyberattack launched by unidentified actors. One of the sites, the one of the Middle District of Florida, was offline for around four hours, the Washington Post reported.
While officials are refusing to comment on the incident, an email sent out by a federal court clerk suggests that this appears to be a “new national cyberattack on the judiciary,” POLITICO informs.
At the time of writing, the websites appear to be back online. However, the PACER website still displays a service alert to warn users that they might experience problems while trying to connect to PACER or Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) websites throughout the country.