*Updated
The Criminal Justice Secure email system has gone down leaving users – many of which are barristers or prosecutors in the middle of a trial – with no access to emails and documents for up to two weeks.
A message sent by the CJSM team posted (above) and shared on social media apologises for the ‘major service degradation’ to CJSM and says that a two-step resolution will require engineers to restore access to the webmail service and then to synchronise the contents of the mailbox. “This means your mailbox will be temporarily empty while we complete this,” the message says. “We estimate the restoration process to take up to two weeks, however we will provide an update as this progresses over the next few days.”
Social media has lit up with complaints about the disruption including from ‘Crime Girl’ who says: “I am in the middle of a lengthy trial. The prosecution sent all the documents via CJSM to defence counsel. For security/GDPR reasons many people don’t save versions to their laptop. No-one has access to their emails. Our CJS, ladies and gentlemen.”
We contacted Egress Technologies, provider of CJSM, for comment and are told that they are in the process of signing off a statement.
*We have received a statement from the Ministry of Justice as follows: “Around an eighth of users (75,000) of the Criminal Justice secure email system (CJSM) have been affected over the last 36 hours but are now able to send and receive emails again. The overwhelming majority (550,000) were unaffected. We will be restoring the email history of those affected over the next few days.”
