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Germany’s lower house of parliament suffered a major email outage on Monday in what officials suspect was a cyber attack, coinciding with high-stakes US-Ukraine talks hosted by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Members of parliament were unable to access their email accounts for more than four hours, according to three senior MPs. One of the MPs said the “attack” began as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy entered the Bundestag for talks with its president, Julia Klöckner.
A government insider said he suspected the outage was a retaliatory cyber attack following Germany’s decision to summon the Russian ambassador to the foreign ministry last week over alleged sabotage and hybrid warfare incidents.
“We know who it is probably coming from,” the government insider said. A spokesperson for the government declined to comment.
The email disruption occurred shortly after talks between Zelenskyy and Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, along with the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, concluded at the German chancellery — just a few hundred metres away — on a possible settlement to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The incident came after Berlin last Friday summoned Russia’s ambassador to confront him over accusations of sabotage operations, cyber attacks and election interference.
The German government also accused Moscow of running disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing “divisions” in German society.
“This targeted manipulation of information is one of a wide range of activities by Russia aimed at undermining confidence in democratic institutions and processes in Germany,” a spokesman for the foreign ministry said last week.
Merz has repeatedly warned that Russia is in effect already waging war against Europe — and Germany in particular — through daily cyber attacks and acts of sabotage.
“We are not at war, but we are also no longer living in peace,” Merz said on Saturday.
The Bundestag has previously been the target of Russian hackers.
In 2015, British intelligence said “a significant amount of data was stolen” in an attack that affected the email accounts of several MPs as well as then chancellor Angela Merkel.
The UK’s national cyber security centre said it had assessed “with high confidence that the GRU was almost certainly responsible”.
Last week, the German government said disruption to its air traffic control in August 2024 could be now attributed “with certainty” to the Russian hacker group “Fancy Bear” and GRU, the Russian military intelligence service.
Officials also accused Moscow of attempting to influence this year’s federal elections and damage candidates including Merz by spreading disinformation through a group called “Storm 1516”.
The Russian embassy in Berlin has denied the accusations.