Advocates and litigants had trouble finding out where and when their cases would be heard on Monday, October 26. The Judiciary's online Cause List Portal went down, and court administrators turned to WhatsApp groups to share the daily lists.

In a notice to court users, the Judiciary confirmed the outage and blamed it on unspecified technical challenges. It said technical teams were working to restore the service.

"Technical challenges affecting the Causelist Portal are being addressed," the Judiciary said, adding that "alternative arrangements have been put in place to facilitate access to court sessions scheduled for today."

What court users were told to do

The portal, causelist.court.go.ke, is where lawyers, litigants, journalists and the public check which matters are listed before which judge or magistrate on a given day. For virtual hearings, it also carries the links needed to join.

With the portal down, the Judiciary asked advocates and litigants to log in to their e-filing accounts and open the Calendar feature. There they could find their matters and any virtual court links.

Court administrators were directed to download the day's cause lists from the internal Court Tracking System (CTS). They then shared them in the Bar-Bench and court users' WhatsApp groups for each station. Where possible, judges and judicial officers were asked to display the cause lists on screen during virtual sessions. Anyone who still could not find their matter was advised to contact their advocate or the court administration at their station.

By the time of publication, the Judiciary had not said what caused the problem or when the portal would be back online.

Growing reliance on digital systems

Kenya's courts have moved most of their operations online in recent years. Filing, fee payment, cause lists and many hearings now run on digital platforms, a shift that sped up during the Covid-19 pandemic. This has cut the need for physical visits to court registries. It also means that when one platform fails, thousands of people across the country can be affected at once.

This is not the first such disruption. In July 2025, the Judiciary reported that external interference had disrupted network services behind its public-facing platforms. The cause list portal was restored within hours then, but the e-filing system suffered intermittent outages for longer.

Monday's outage also came days after the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy and the ICT Authority issued an urgent advisory. The advisory warned about critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language widely used to run websites, and told government agencies and businesses to patch their systems. There is no indication that the advisory is linked to the Judiciary's problem, and the Judiciary has not attributed the outage to any security incident.

Impact on court users

For advocates who appear in several courts in a day, the cause list is a basic planning tool. Without it, lawyers risk missing hearings or turning up in the wrong courtroom, and unrepresented litigants may struggle to get the information at all. Using WhatsApp groups kept courts running, but it depends on users already belonging to the right groups for their station.

The Judiciary asked court users to be patient while its technical teams work to restore full access.

Photos: Wikimedia Commons/Wing (CC BY-SA 3.0) (High Court building, Nairobi); The Kenya Times (Chief Justice Martha Koome, file).