Software upgrade blamed for outage in eFiling and Case.net systems

Listen to this article

An automatic software upgrade shut down the Missouri eFiling and Case.net systems in a number of circuits Monday.

It’s unclear how many circuits were affected by the computer outage. The Office of State Courts Administrator first notified registered eFiling users that the systems were down at 8:52 a.m. Monday. An update emailed at 10:47 a.m. said eFiling and Case.net were still unavailable for existing cases in Cooper, Cape Girardeau, Stoddard and McDonald counties and in the Southern and Western appellate courts.

The notification that all was clear came out at 3:52 p.m. Monday.

A Jackson County spokeswoman said that they didn’t hear complaints from judges.

Other courts, including the St. Louis Circuit Court, experienced only a slow-down of the Justice Information System, which is the judiciary’s case-management system. In other courts, the problem was more severe.

The Southeast Missourian reported on Tuesday that the computer glitch kept Cape Girardeau Circuit Judge William Syler from hearing most of the 54 cases on his Monday docket. The circuit adopted electronic filing and is paperless.

Syler, according to the newspaper, was able to continue some cases.

On Tuesday, State Courts Administrator Greg Linhares said that an automatic software upgrade “had unanticipated effects that we discovered after the fact.” He refused to identify the “well-known” software vendor or describe what the software does.

The main issue affected the judiciary’s databases, but Linhares said the databases, Case.net and JIS are all interrelated.

He said OSCA is working on a long-range plan to develop a database failover, which is a redundant system that would take over in the case of a failure. The plan hasn’t been implemented yet, he said.

“In this particular instance, since this was a piece of proprietary software that we purchased, we didn’t necessarily know what the effect of that was going to be on our system when it was rolled out,” Linhares said.

As far as preventing future outages, Linhares said there is no “magic bullet.” It’s just a matter of constant communication between the people who manage the various systems “to make sure that we’re looking out ahead for unintended consequences as best we can,” he said.