A cyberattack on contractor BAE Systems halted bankruptcy notices for federal courts nationwide

A cybersecurity incident at BAE Systems, the British defense and technology company that runs systems for the federal judiciary, has stopped the production of bankruptcy notices for every federal bankruptcy court in the United States. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts disclosed the outage on Thursday, October 15, 2026.

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Debtors, creditors and trustees depend on those notices to learn about meetings, deadlines and rulings, and none were being produced as of the latest public statements.

The Bankruptcy Noticing Center outage

The affected service is the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, known as the BNC, which produces and transmits bankruptcy notices on behalf of all federal bankruptcy courts. In its notice on the judiciary’s website, the Administrative Office said the incident has halted the BNC’s production and distribution of notices and that access is unavailable to bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov and the National Creditor Registration Service.

Jonathan Greig of The Record from Recorded Future News reported that production of bankruptcy notices has been halted entirely. The notice gives no restoration timeline and no guidance for filers, and the Administrative Office did not answer The Record’s questions about the nature of the incident or whether any data was stolen. The FBI did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment, and CISA, which typically handles attacks on federal agencies, directed reporters back to the U.S. Courts.

What BAE Systems and the courts have said

Court officials said BAE “is actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations,” according to The Record, and that the Administrative Office has been in communication with the impacted courts while coordinating with BAE Systems. A BAE spokesperson, who was not named, said the company is aware of a security incident that is “isolated to the BNC system” and that it has taken immediate steps to address it, adding that BAE is coordinating closely with the Administrative Office on the response.

The wording is narrow and, so far, unverifiable by outsiders. BAE describes the problem as confined to one system, and the courts have not said that case management or filing systems are affected. What is publicly known is the outage itself: websites down and notices stopped. Whether the cause was ransomware, data theft or something else has not been stated by either organization.

Why a halt in notices carries legal weight

Notice in bankruptcy is built into the procedural rules. Under Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 2002, creditors are generally owed at least 21 days of notice of the meeting of creditors, and the same rule sets notice periods for sale hearings, claim deadlines and plan confirmation. A creditor who never receives a mailed or electronic notice may miss a window to file a claim or object to a plan.

The public statements do not say how courts will handle deadlines affected by the outage, and the Administrative Office page points to the individual courts for operating status. Anyone with a case in the system is left to check with the specific court handling it until the notices resume.

The rule’s clock structure shows why a gap matters. Hearings on disclosure statements and the deadlines for plan objections in chapter 9 and chapter 11 cases carry 28 days of notice, while creditors with foreign addresses are owed 30 days before a proof-of-claim deadline unless the court orders otherwise. Notices of the order for relief, of dismissal or conversion, and of plan confirmation orders are also on the list. Each of those mailings flows through a system that is currently down, and the courts have not said whether they are using another channel.

A run of attacks on court systems

The BNC outage lands in a stretch of trouble for court technology, and for contractors serving government more broadly. The Record noted that the Department of Transportation confirmed on Wednesday, October 14 that a safety agency contact center was taken offline after a contractor was hit with a cyberattack, and that recent weeks also brought incidents involving the Defense Department and the FBI. The Arizona Supreme Court announced in late September that hackers had stolen data, and The Record reported that information on more than 1.3 million people was taken from the state’s court files, including names, Social Security numbers and case numbers tied to a fines and fees program, and more than 150,000 foster care review reports. Investigators believe that attack began with a phishing email opened by a court employee.

On the federal side, officials said in August 2025 that they were tightening security after what Politico reported as a major hack of PACER, the case filing system, a development The Record covered when the federal judiciary announced tighter digital security. Michael Scudder, chair of the judiciary’s information technology committee, had told Congress in written testimony two months earlier that the courts face “unrelenting security threats of extraordinary gravity” given the information in their control. The BNC incident is a different system, run by a contractor, but it carries the same exposure: the courts rely on outside vendors for services every case depends on.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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