WASHINGTON — A creditor owed money by a company that filed for bankruptcy this week may not know it. The federal system that sends those notices for every bankruptcy court in the country has been down since October 9, and on Thursday the judiciary said the cause is a cybersecurity incident at the contractor that runs it.
In a statement dated October 15, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said the IT and websites BAE Systems operates for the Bankruptcy Noticing Center “have been impacted by a cybersecurity incident.” The judiciary’s own description of the arrangement is plain: BAE Systems runs the center’s systems and websites on its behalf, and the incident “has also halted the BNC’s production and distribution of bankruptcy notices.”
The center’s websites are unreachable, including bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov and the National Creditor Registration Service. The Administrative Office said it is in communication with the affected courts and coordinating with BAE, which it said is “actively investigating this incident and working to restore operations.” It gave no restoration time. Those notices are how creditors learn a case exists and when they have to act, so every day of silence is a day someone may miss a deadline.
The bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York said in an October 13 notice that the disruption began October 9 and affects “all U.S. Bankruptcy Courts.” Parties who normally receive notices and orders through the center “may experience delays,” the court said, and CM/ECF users cannot generate or print a list of creditors. “At this time, we do not have an estimated date or time for restoration of services,” it added. Notices of Electronic Filing, the separate CM/ECF email alerts, continue to go out normally.
Courts are improvising. The Middle District of Florida entered Administrative Order FLMB-2026-5 on October 13, extending deadlines after finding “good cause for relief under Fed. R. Bankr. P. 9006.” On Thursday, the court’s announcements page warned of delays in serving 341 notices, the notices of creditors’ meetings, and told lawyers to pull creditor lists through a CM/ECF query. The workaround has holes. The list, the court said, “does not include all interested parties to a case, such as the debtor(s), trustees, or the U.S. Trustee,” and it does not carry a creditor’s preferred mailing address. An amended order “may be entered shortly.”
The timeline is the awkward part. Florida’s October 13 order cited what the center had told the court: “a problem with its servers.” The October 13 notices from three courts spoke of a “service disruption” or a server problem. The word cybersecurity arrived only in Thursday’s statement, six days after the notices stopped.
The Administrative Office’s statement does not say how the systems were compromised, whether any data was taken, who is responsible, or which BAE Systems entity operates the center. It carries no start date; October 9 comes from the court notices. BAE’s own account was not available to The Eastern Herald at publication time. Nor does the statement say whether notices that went unsent since October 9 will be reissued, or who answers for it when a creditor’s deadline passes unnoticed.
