BY PEPPER FISHER
Clallam County – Washington state courts’ online systems were down Monday after officials said they detected “unauthorized activity” on the electronic network, and this is affecting operations at the Clallam County District Courts this week.
As the state courts’ administrative office works to restore the systems and determine how the network has been impacted, Wendy Ferrell with the state Administrative Office of the Courts said she could not provide details about the outage “for security reasons,” but said state court officials “have no reason to believe that was a targeted attack.”
At the Courthouse here in Port Angeles, the Clerk of Superior Court Nikki Botmen told KONP on Tuesday that because all the systems are down, they are not able to access their daily court calendars, they can’t take in funds in the normal way so they’ve gone back to using their old-fashioned receipt book, they can’t look up cases for people, but they do have access to their paper records. So if a person has a case number they should be able to help them.
Botmen said AOC has told them systems will certainly be down for the rest of this week, but they don’t know how extended the shutdown will be. She said they are still opening new cases, processing protection orders, and most other functions, but she asks that folks practice a little more patience as the state works on the problem.