Bankruptcy courts can file cases but can’t deliver notices

Federal bankruptcy courts are still accepting filings and opening cases, but the system that produces and delivers notices to parties has been unavailable nationwide since October 9, 2026.

The disruption affects the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), a service operated by BAE Systems for the Federal Judiciary. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said on October 15 that a cybersecurity incident affected BAE-operated IT and websites supporting the BNC. The service produces and transmits bankruptcy notices for every federal bankruptcy court in the United States.

The courts have not described a nationwide failure of case filing or document processing. The outage has halted generating and distributing notices that tell creditors, debtors, attorneys, trustees, and other parties about filings, hearings, orders, and deadlines.

The judiciary’s October 15 incident notice says that access to BNC systems, related websites, and the bankruptcy noticing process is unavailable. The affected services include bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov, and the National Creditor Registration Service.

The federal notice does not identify the incident type, an intrusion method, an attacker, whether data was accessed, or a restoration target. It also does not say whether the shutdown was precautionary, necessary to contain an incident, or both. BAE is investigating and restoring operations, but the available statements do not disclose the core security facts.

The operational break began October 9

The Eastern District of Texas says it was informed that the disruption began on October 9, 2026. Its notice specifies that electronic and paper bankruptcy notices are both affected nationwide.

The Eastern District of Texas will continue to accept filings, open cases, and process documents under its normal procedures. But it warned that the entry and service of notices and orders, as well as service of 341 Notices, may be delayed until the service is restored.

For bankruptcy practitioners, filing a document does not guarantee the normal notice workflow that follows. A case can enter the system while court-generated and BNC-generated notices remain stalled.

The Texas court has also issued General Orders 2026-1 and 2026-2 to provide deadline-related relief. Reporting on the orders says that for cases filed on or after September 14 with an active motion to stay, the relevant delay is extended by 30 days. The court’s service-interruption notice does not publish the complete text of those orders, so their full scope should not be inferred from the outage notice alone.

A limited workaround, with a material caveat

The BNC outage is also blocking CM/ECF users from accessing the mailing matrix. The Eastern District of Texas has provided an alternative route to retrieve creditors and their addresses: users can open Query in CM/ECF, enter a case number, select Run Query, choose Creditor, leave the creditor-type field blank if needed, and run the query to list creditors.

The court says the resulting list does not include all interested parties, specifically naming debtors, trustees, the U.S. Trustee, and the U.S. Attorney as examples. Counsel and parties must still review service requirements and ensure that notice reaches every appropriate recipient.

The substitute provides a creditor-address lookup, not a replacement for the BNC or a complete service list. Required recipients may be absent from the query output.

What is down and what is still operating

According to BAE Systems, the incident is isolated to the BNC system rather than a stated outage across the federal judiciary’s entire case-management infrastructure. Courts are continuing to receive filings, but bankruptcy administration depends on reliable notice delivery, and the BNC is the centralized service for that task across federal bankruptcy courts.

“BAE Systems, Inc. operates the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) on behalf of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC). We are aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system and have taken immediate steps to address it. We are coordinating closely with AOUSC on the response.”

The public statements do not establish whether the BNC’s underlying data, backups, or connected court systems were affected. They also do not say whether the unavailable services are being rebuilt, restored from backup, or returned after incident-response validation. “Isolated” is a scope statement from the contractor, not evidence that the incident had no impact beyond service availability.

The judiciary had already flagged case-system targeting

In August 2025, the U.S. Courts said it was strengthening cybersecurity measures because of increased targeting of its case-management system. The current event concerns the BNC, a contractor-operated notice service, but it shows the operational exposure when a nationwide court workflow relies on a centralized external operator.

The incident also arrives after other court-system attacks cited by officials and reporting, including an attack affecting Arizona’s judicial systems in September 2026. Those incidents should not be treated as technically connected: no public statement attributes the BNC disruption to the actors behind any other attack, and none establishes a shared tactic or infrastructure.

A cyber incident against one BAE-operated service has not stopped federal bankruptcy courts from taking new cases, but it has suspended the nationwide delivery layer that turns court activity into notice for affected parties. The restoration date, the cause of the incident, and the status of potentially affected data remain undisclosed.