The website of Finland’s Ministry of Justice (www.om.fi), as well as that of the Finlex database (www.finlex.fi), has been unavailable — at least largely so — since late Sunday, 4 October 2009.
Update added on 6 October 2009: After an outage of almost two days, the sites are now available again. The remainder of this article is preserved for reference.
Finlex, which is hosted by the same Ministry, is an official service providing access in Finnish, Swedish and English to laws, decrees, precedents and international treaties as well as to other information about Finland’s legal order. The service is highly used by legal professionals as well as by the public. Consequently, a growing number of eyebrows have been raised in online discussions as the downtime has continued. Despite this, the Ministry was initially not available for comments by telephone, and answered emailed questions only with auto-responses.
On 6 October 2009, the Ministry did state that the problem applies to certain telecom operators and that it is under investigation. In addition to the Ministry’s main site and Finlex, three other sites are also affected: www.kansanvalta.fi, www.vksv.oikeus.fi and www.kuulutusrekisteri.oikeus.fi. The Ministry did not state a time or date for expected restoration of normal service.
From my perspective, the outage is an all-out one. When trying to access the affected sites, I have used the networks of several different Finnish backbone operators (i.e., FICIX members), as well as various networks outside of Finland, but every attempt has failed.
(When a client tries to access the root of the site, the HTTP server replies with a “302 Found” redirection, but when the target URI of that redirection is requested in a subsequent GET command, the connection hangs. Until the client disconnects the session, it may remain in limbo for several hours, never returning any useful error message on any protocol level.)
Alternatives to Finlex
Other quality databases on Finnish law include Edita’s Edilex (mostly in Finnish) and Sanoma’s Juridiikkaonline (entirely in Finnish). Both are chargeable, and neither includes all the information that Finlex provided. Edita has also made a test version of Finlex available at finlextest.prima.edita.fi.
Your views
What do you think about this issue? Please post your comments!
Post a Comment