The police in Lower Saxony had to fight for days with massive IT failures. As a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry confirmed the SPIEGEL, there was since Monday nationwide "disruptions in the field of server infrastructure and data processing." Many of the 19,000 police computers with the centrally controlled IT platform "police client" had been temporarily shut down. The NDR had first reported about it.
It was therefore often not possible for officials to write e-mails, to use Windows and to operate the internal systems Polas and Nivadis. Information about persons may not have been available on the computer. Such a failure can significantly hamper policing, especially at a time when a search is in progress.
Officials grab paper and pencil
An affected policeman from Lower Saxony told the SPIEGEL that the outages sometimes took several hours. "The whole organization stands still." At how many computers in the country there were failures, the spokeswoman in the Ministry of Interior could not say. On Friday morning so far there have been no trouble reports. Assume that the problem is resolved.
The spokeswoman was unable to provide any specific information about the cause. It is clear that it is "not a cyberattack or a computer virus". Basically, the "necessary communication skills" had been given. In some situations, officials would have to grab paper and pen.