The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC)‘s operations have remained halted throughout the country for the last four days due to a “network failure” of its ‘eOffice’ application. This has sparked fears within the Customs department of a possible compromise of sensitive internal data.
Businessline has accessed internal communication sent out to zones and directorates by the CBIC in which the Board acknowledges the “network failure in the NIC/RailTel Data Centre”. It also said that “currently” there is “no estimated timeline for restoration”.
While NIC offers application to the eOffice of the CBIC, the platform is hosted on RailTel data.
“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,” eOffice support team of the CBIC’s Directorate General of Performance Management (DGPM) informed CBIC field offices across the country on Thursday.
“The outage, which began on the afternoon of 09-02-2025 (Sunday) is still ongoing as of 13-02-2025, and there is currently no estimated timeline for restoration,” the communication stated.
This is the second of two letters dispatched on the paralysed CBIC’s e-network.
The DGPM had earlier informed all zones and directorates about the issue through an email on February 10, 2025. In that advisory, the DGPM suggested that, in the interim, “urgent work may be carried out on physical files”.
Businessline spoke to multiple officers posted in different States and Union Territories to assess the impact of the breakdown of the eOffice.
Officers appeared clueless and were wondering why it was taking so much time to rectify if it was merely a technical issue.
A senior Indian Revenue Service (Customs & Indirect Taxes) officer in Delhi said that it “looks like the system has been compromised”.
“Nothing has been told to us about the exact reason of the network breakdown in written communications from the Board. If it’s a cyber attack, it would have hit voluminous trade and business data hosted on the eOffice network,” said the IRS officer.
Another officer from Karnataka was equally worried about his personal records, including salary details, possibly getting into the wrong hands.
A senior customs department officer in Maharashtra said the work has been paralysed but they are managing with the physical files which can be uploaded later online.
However, indirectly GST issues have also been affected because much of the related work flows from eOffice correspondence through the hierarchy in offices, he noted.
“As of today, 13-02-2025, there is still no update, services are unlikely to be restored anytime soon and it is not possible to provide a timeline. Further information will be shared as soon as it becomes available from NIC/RailTel,” the CBIC internal communication stated.
CBIC sources, in response to a questionnaire from businessline, said: “The resolution of the technical issue is expected in a day or two. The urgent and important works are currently processed on physical files to facilitate clearance of urgent matters pertaining to assessee/taxpayers.”
The government department websites have been facing cyber attacks. According to information shared with Parliament, 36 websites of ministries and departments of the Central and State governments were subjected to hacking in the first six months of 2023.
According to data shared by the then Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar in Lok Sabha in August, 2023, a total of 1,12,474 cyber security incidents have been tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).
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