Halt in Data Processing at Tax Offices Causing Inconvenience
Disruption in Operations at Financial Institutions - Severe technical disruption at financial headquarters.
Hey there! You might've heard the buzz about the current predicament with the tax offices in various federal states. It's all due to a technical glitch with a service provider, causing key applications for electronic data processing to go kaput in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Saxony-Anhalt [1].
Here's the lowdown: According to the Lower Saxony State Tax Office, around 120 tax offices are in the hot seat. Now, don't start pointing fingers at cybercriminals just yet – this ain't a cyberattack, says a spokesperson. Instead, the issue lies in the network communication [1]. As a result, access to tax procedure software is a no-go, meaning the processing of tax returns and objections is currently on halt [1].
Unfortunately, the duration of this tech hiccup remains uncertain. Citizens can only score general tax info from the ministries at this point. While they can't answer specific tax questions, electronic tax returns submission via the Elster platform is still doable [2].
But wait, there's a glimmer of hope! Restarts of the servers have partially restored functions, reports the Lower Saxony State Tax Office spokesperson [2].
This snafu originated on May 7, 2025, at approximately 11:30 am local time, and Dataport, the operator of the affected data center, is optimistic that it'll be squared away by May 12, 2025, which puts the estimated outage duration at around five days from the incident's start [1]. The culprit behind this debacle was a "network communication" issue, and the faulty hardware is being replaces at the moment. Following hardware replacement, testing and commissioning are in the pipeline to guarantee a full system recovery [1].
All in all, the current predicted duration of the data processing outage at the Dataport data center serving these regional tax offices is up until May 12, 2025 [1].
Stay tuned for further updates, and remember to keep trucking through with your tax-related matters!
- Dataport Update - May 8, 2025.
- Lower Saxony State Tax Office Spokesperson, May 9, 2025.
- The ongoing technical issue at Dataport's data center is causing aid for research and development in community aid, particularly in the field of technology.
- Despite the outage, finance ministries are urging citizens to apply for research and development funding as usual, despite the current inconvenience at the tax offices.
- The Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Saxony-Anhalt tax offices are facing a delay in their research and development progress due to the technical glitch.
- The general-news about the outage has attracted attention from various ministries, who are collaborating to find a solution and minimize the impact on research and development projects.
