DATEV: Applications disrupted since Tuesday noon

“Disruption of DATEV applications” writes DATEV on its website – and reader reports also confirm that the IT service provider experienced disruptions on Tuesday. However, the company does not elaborate on the exact nature of these disruptions or how they affect customers.

In a thread on the DATEV Community, an employee has been providing updates on the outage since around 1 PM today. According to the thread, root cause analysis ran until 2:55 PM, and the problem was apparently narrowed down starting at 3:30 PM. At 4:30 PM, the message was that the resolution was still ongoing. However, there have been initial signs of improvement since 5:30 PM: “The node in the data center seems to be resolving itself and the applications are starting up again,” the DATEV employee reports there. Another status update was expected around 6:45 PM.

Any detailed information about what triggered the outage or what exactly was disrupted remains scarce at the moment. It is unclear whether there was an IT attack or if it was merely configuration, hardware, or software errors.

Data Center Status

DATEV also provides a website with status information for its data center. It indicates that 260 out of 262 services are running normally. The two disrupted services are Datev SmartTransfer, which has not processed any documents since 10:51 AM, and in Financial Accounting, the “Automation Services Activation/Deactivation” has shown an unspecified disruption since 2:57 PM.

The last major disruptions at DATEV occurred in January. A faulty repair attempt in the Lodas system led to the misdelivery of sensitive client data at DATEV. Large companies initially run test payrolls on the systems, which are then returned to the senders. This resulted in a backlog; technicians attempted a fix – and created a serious data protection incident. After the fix, the systems did not return the documents to the rightful clients but distributed them randomly to unrelated clients.

(dmk)