Outages impact Washington state courts after ‘unauthorized activity’ detected on network

A potential cyber intrusion is causing outages within court systems across the state of Washington this week.

On Monday, the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) warned state residents that it “recently identified unauthorized activity on the Washington Courts network.” 

The outages have affected courts in the counties of Thurston, Monroe, Renton, Puyallup, Bainbridge, King, Pierce, Whatcom, and Lewis as well as municipal courts in several cities. 

“We have taken immediate action to secure critical systems and are working to safely restore service. 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,” the AOC said.

The AOC did not respond to requests for an update or comment about whether they are dealing with a ransomware attack. As of Wednesday afternoon, its website was still down. 

Several county court systems have also released statements warning of issues caused by the technology outages. 

Pierce County Superior Court said that, while it may be affected in some small ways, it does not “expect any significant impact” and the court was operating normally on Monday.

Some courts said electronic filing systems and phone systems were down while others mentioned issues related to platforms used to pay fines. 

Thurston County District Court said anyone with a scheduled infraction hearing would  not be required to appear and a new court date will be sent to them. 

Wendy Ferrell, associate director for the AOC, told the Seattle Times that they “have no reason to believe that was a targeted attack.” They declined to provide more information about what exactly was causing the outages.

The incident comes just days after California’s San Joaquin County Superior Court said that nearly all of its digital services have been knocked offline due to a cyberattack. 

Court systems in Pennsylvania, Florida, Louisiana, California, Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, Missouri, Kansas and Illinois have all dealt with data leaks, ransomware incidents or distributed denial-of-service attacks over the last year that limited operations and caused significant issues.

Washington state itself has been battered by ransomware gangs in 2024, with a large school district, cancer center, Department of Transportation and Port of Seattle — which includes the airport — facing outages caused by significant cyberattacks.