Resilience

Since Friday, October 9, 2026, the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC) has not sent a single notice. The BNC is the service that prints, mails and emails notices for every federal bankruptcy court in the United States, and it is run for the judiciary by contractor BAE Systems. On Thursday, October 15, the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) said BAE's IT and the websites that support the BNC had been hit by a cybersecurity incident, and that production and distribution of bankruptcy notices has stopped.

If you file bankruptcy cases, hold claims against debtors, act as a trustee, or rely on court notices to know when to file a proof of claim or object to a discharge, this affects you now. Courts are still open and still accepting filings, but the notices that tell parties what happened are not going out, and several courts have moved the job of serving them onto attorneys and trustees.

What is down and what still works

The AO statement lists four services as unavailable: bnc.uscourts.gov, bankruptcynotices.uscourts.gov, notices.uscourts.gov and the National Creditor Registration Service (NCRS). NCRS is the free service that lets a creditor name a preferred mail, email or fax address for notices under 11 U.S.C. 342(f), so large creditors do not get notices scattered across old addresses.

Court notices show what is still working. The Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF) is up, so courts keep accepting filings, opening cases and processing documents. Notices of Electronic Filing (NEFs), the emails CM/ECF sends to registered attorneys, trustees and the US Trustee when something is docketed, are not affected. What has gone is everything that depended on the BNC: paper notices, Electronic Bankruptcy Noticing emails, the 341 meeting notices that go to creditors, and the creditor mailing lists and labels that CM/ECF users normally print through NCRS.

Why one contractor stops every court

Bankruptcy noticing is centralised by design. Each court generates the notice in CM/ECF, and the BNC turns it into mail or email for every listed creditor, applying the preferred addresses held in NCRS. That gives creditors one place to register and courts one supplier to manage, and it also means a single incident at one contractor stopped noticing for all bankruptcy courts at once.

The less visible problem is the address data. The Southern District of New York and others say CM/ECF users may not be able to produce a list of creditors at all. CyberScoop reports that address lists pulled from CM/ECF may leave out people who registered through the BNC's electronic noticing program or NCRS, so a party serving notices by hand can miss recipients who would normally get them.

What has been confirmed, and what has not

The first court notices, posted on Tuesday, October 13, called this a "nationwide service outage" and did not mention a cyberattack. The AO statement of October 15 was the first to call it a cybersecurity incident. A BAE spokesperson said the company is "aware of a security incident that is isolated to the BNC system" and has taken immediate steps to address it, and told CyberScoop that no other systems were affected. CISA referred questions to the US Courts, and the FBI did not respond to The Record.

Nobody has said what kind of attack this was, whether any data was accessed or taken, or when service will return. As of Friday, October 16, the websites were still offline. The BNC holds names and addresses of debtors and creditors across every bankruptcy court, but whether any of that was exposed is unknown. Treat any claim either way as unconfirmed until the AO or BAE says otherwise.

What to do

1. Read your court's order today. Courts are handling this differently. The Middle District of Tennessee (Administrative Order 26-2) requires debtors' attorneys to serve the Notice of Commencement of the Case in new chapter 7, 11 and 12 cases filed from October 8, with the chapter 13 trustee serving in chapter 13 cases. The Southern District of Indiana has issued General Orders 26-0003 and 26-0004 on relief and notice requirements. The Central District of Illinois tells parties not to rely on the BNC and to send time-sensitive notices themselves.
2. Build service lists from CM/ECF, then add to them. In the Middle District of Tennessee, CM/ECF users can run Query, enter the case number and choose Creditor with the creditor type left blank. That list leaves out the debtor, trustees and the US Trustee, and may miss NCRS preferred addresses, so check it against your own records and the service rules.
3. Watch the docket instead of the mailbox. Creditors who registered with NCRS will receive nothing until the BNC is back. Check PACER for the cases you care about, especially bar dates and 341 meeting dates, and make sure your NEF email registrations are current.
4. Ask the judge if a deadline is at risk. The Central District of Illinois directs requests for relief based on the outage to the judge assigned to the case. Keep a record of when you checked and what you served.
5. Expect fake "BNC restored" emails. We have not seen a phishing campaign tied to this outage reported, but a nationwide service that thousands of firms are waiting on is an easy lure. Check restoration on your court's news page or uscourts.gov, and do not re-register for notices or enter PACER credentials through a link in an email.

The wider lesson for outsourced services

Law firms, creditors and servicers rarely list the BNC as a vendor, yet their deadlines depend on it. The same is true of any outsourced print-and-mail, statement delivery or e-signature service. For each one, ask the supplier how long it would take them to tell you about an incident (here, six days passed between the outage and the word "cybersecurity"), what data they hold for you, and whether you can export your recipient list if their system is down. Keep a manual path for the notices that carry legal deadlines, and test it once a year.

If you want help mapping which of your suppliers sit on a critical path, our compliance and audit readiness team runs that review, and our security operations team can watch for phishing that imitates a supplier during an outage. Open the chat and Yaali, our AI agent, will pass your question to an engineer.

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Sources: Administrative Office of the US Courts, The Record, BleepingComputer, CyberScoop, US Bankruptcy Court SDNY, US Bankruptcy Court MDTN, US Bankruptcy Court CDIL, US Bankruptcy Court SDIN, US Bankruptcy Court WDLA on NCRS.