CBIC Operations Ceased since 9 Feb; Network Failure to Blame

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs ( CBIC ) has been facing a complete operational hiatus since February 9 owing to a major network failure, disrupting the regular workflow of the country’s tax administration system. The disruptions have been attributed to a technical malfunction faced by a third-party tech-service giant that maintains the CBIC e-portal for the Indian Government.

Internal communication accessed by Businessline reveals that the CBI had advised subsidiary zones and directorates of the “network failure in the NIC/RailTel Data Centre” and that there is currently “no estimated timeline for restoration” (sic).

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The internal communication accessed by Businessline had the eOffice support team of the CBIC’s Directorate General of Performance Management (DGPM) inform CBIC field offices the following message: “This is to inform you that the eOffice services of CBIC and multiple other organisations continue to remain non-functional due to a network failure in the NIC/RailTel Data Centre, where CBIC’s eOffice application is hosted,” 

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Reports state that the network disruption began on Sunday, 9 February, 2025 and was still yet to to be resolved as of Thursday, 13 February, 2025 with no immediate estimated timeline for restoration.

While CBIC Officers and aggrieved users remain frantic, the talk of the town is that the e-portal system maintained by the tech-service has been compromised. Skeptics say that if the down-time may be attributed to a cyber-attack, the same would mean a huge security lapse on the insurmountable amounts of trade and business data hosted on the eOffice network.

Amidst the outage, the department has resorted to classic ways of work, resuming work on physical files that shall later be synchronized with the e-portal.

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Indian Governmental websites are not afresh to cyber attacks, having been periodically heckled by hackers and cyber-criminals. A 2023 Report shared by former Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar in Lok Sabha during August 2023 revealed that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the nodal agency responsible for responding to computer security incidents had tracked up a total of 1,12,474 cyber security incidents at the time.

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While recent reports suggest no updates of resolution, it is hopeful that the issues shall be resolved shortly to deploy the e-portal soon.

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