Overview

• A major technical failure at a third-party IT provider has disrupted tax offices in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Niedersachsen, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Sachsen-Anhalt.
• Critical data-processing applications remain offline, restricting tax offices to providing only general advice and halting responses to specific queries.
• The electronic Elster portal for submitting tax returns is still operational despite the outage.
• Authorities have not provided an estimate for when full functionality will be restored.
• The disruption highlights the dependency of German tax administrations on centralized IT services and the challenges of maintaining digital continuity.