Disaster Relief: Court Extends Filing Deadlines Due to "Global IT Outage"

From the Northern District of Illinois federal court's General Order 24-0021 today:

The court recognizes that the July 19, 2024 global IT outage creates great difficulty for litigants attempting to meet court deadlines. It is, therefore, HEREBY ORDERED THAT the date for filing of any orders, writs, process, pleadings, or other matters otherwise due or heretofore made returnable on July 19, 2024, is hereby extended and continued to Monday, July 22, 2024.

Makes sense to me. I expect that, even without such an order, courts would forgive delays under such circumstances, but it's always good for a court to acknowledge this up front. (I don't know whether this will help with statutory deadlines that affect a court's jurisdiction; if readers know the answer to that, please note it in the comments.)

Rumors that federal courts worried about the Y2K bug extended court deadlines to January 1, 1900 have no basis in fact.

C-00000291-00000000-00000032.sys delenda est.

Comments

[santamonica811]

While I don't *know* the answer to EV's question; it's hard to imagine that a court would not have at least some authority to extend even those sorts of statutory deadlines re Jx. Imagine a massive earthquake hits California. For a week, infrastructure is down, electronic services are down. Can we imagine that the legal system would really say, "Sorry, everyone who is now time-barred...hard cheese for you."? Also, if that's actually the case; it would be a huge incentive for horrible people to get rid of unwanted cases that were nudging against such deadlines. Setting fire to that particular courthouse. Calling in a fake bomb threat which causes a 1-day closure of the courthouse, etc..

I hope and trust that common-sense does indeed rule the day (subject to, perhaps, an appellate review, to ensure the reasonableness of a lower-level court order granting this sort of extension).

[Drewski]

California has a legislative exception for all statutes of limitations and deadlines if meeting them is "impossible, impractical, or futile." This was judicially created but ratified by the legislature in the '80s.

Contrast with Texas, which strictly enforces jurisdictional bars, even with these orders in effect from the state Supreme Court: "Subject only to constitutional limitations, all courts in Texas may in any case, civil or criminal [. . .]
"Modify or suspend any and all deadlines and procedures, whether prescribed by statute, rule, or order, for a stated period ending no later than 30 days after the Governor’s state of disaster has been lifted."

So there are examples of all three ways to go: Legislative exception, judicially-created exception, and no exceptions.

[branford]

The issue came up in New York early in the pandemic when all filings were restricted when the courts shut down.

The extension of statutory deadlines was accomplished by Cuomo's various executive orders, with a number of extensions and modifications.

There's still some residual litigation on just what was tolled and until when.

[John F. Carr]

When I was in college I was warned that computer problems were not acceptable excuses for turning in work late. Also when I was in college I had a nice IBM typewriter that unfortunately I lost in later years.

My gut reaction is equitable tolling should apply if available but a hard jurisdictional deadline is a hard jurisdictional deadline. If in doubt print out your paper and drop it in the box. Send it by fax if courts still have fax machines.

[Mr. Bumble]

Do any lawyers still use messenger services?

How did anything ever get done in a paper world?

[Longtobefree]

For a detailed technical explanation:
https://babylonbee.com/news/entire-microsoft-network-goes-down-after-greg-removes-usb-device-without-clicking-eject-first

[Michael P]

I'm impressed that some people are hosed because to fix the problem, they need to boot into Safe Mode; to boot into Safe Mode, they need to know the BitLocker recovery keys for that specific computer; to access those recovery keys, they need to log into a cloud service; to log into the cloud service, they need working Active Directory servers; and to fix their Active Directory servers, they need to boot them into Safe Mode.

CrowdStrike deserves to go out of business for this, and a lot of other IT people should get fired or demoted for not having contingency plans for this kind of event.

[NvEric]

"... returnable on July 19, 2024, is hereby extended and continued to Monday, July 22, 2024."

Keywords are "to Monday, ...."
So, is that up until Monday or through Monday ?

[Eugene Volokh]

It's [today,Monday], not (today,Monday).

[Suudy]

"C-00000291-00000000-00000032.sys delenda est."

Clever. I like it.

[RoseBL]

It's reassuring that the court proactively addresses Death By AI the challenges posed by the global IT outage, showing flexibility and understanding in extending deadlines.