11–20 of 77 posts
Nope. not only in Germany. Here is Israel we have more than one site that "close" for the Sabbath. It's moderately interesting to see how religion and the internet co exist.
Not really only in Germany. For instance Nordea Denmark closes its online bank between 2 am and 5 am. Probably because they don't have staff at those times to prevent scammers from transferring money out and people rarely need to use banking during those hours. As someone who sleeps weirdly it has annoyed me once or twice, though.
Maybe this is in fact an API that requires the manual intervention of a clerk? Or perhaps they have a policiy to shut down the office computers after office hours - in any case, a funny comment on Germany bureaucracy.
For a government-to-business service, the overwhelming majority of legitimate transactions will occur during office hours and few people will be significantly inconvenienced by closing overnight. The risk of an attacker gaining even a few hours of brute-force insight is great, but the rewards from operating 24/7 slight.
While I'd like to be able to do my Companies House filings at 4am, I'm more keen to see my data protected.
To be fair, this might not even have to do with germany, as it queries other countries' VAT registries online, many of which are down for maintainance many hours a day. The weird thing is that, even though there is a system for VAT id interconnectivity (VIES) , there is no central database of numbers. [ http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ ]
The Dutch Student grant organization (DUO) is also offline between 12 and 6 "to synchronize front and backend systems"