Court WiFi has been unavailable to lawyers and cases have had to be adjourned because of a failure of the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) IT system, the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) said.

Chris Henley QC, the CBA chairman, blamed the outage affecting Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) on “savage cuts to the MoJ budget”.

Mr Henley said: “The system is on its knees. Legal professionals, judges and court staff have to deal with the mess and it is witnesses, defendants, and their families, and jurors, who [suffer] the consequences. Short-term savings often result in wider costs to the public purse.

“Prolonged IT failures do a disservice to the victims of crime and their families who may have already suffered the costs of delays from an already overstretched, chronically underfunded, broken criminal justice system.”

He added that the courts’ electronic audio recording systems and the service listing current cases were also having problems.

Richard Atkins QC, chair of the bar, told The Independent: “I have no doubt the MoJ and HMCTS are doing all they can to rectify this major problem, but it illustrates how vulnerable the delivery of justice is with reliance on weak IT systems in our courts.

“Whilst HMCTS is moving forward with its programme of online justice, these problems would suggest that more investment in the basics is needed first. We cannot have a justice system that comes to a shuddering halt the moment the IT does not work properly.”

An MoJ spokesman said: “We apologise to those who have been affected by the network issues that we have been experiencing over recent days.

“The urgent work we have been carrying out with our suppliers has led to significant improvements, but this work is ongoing and we have contingency plans in place.

“While services have continued to operate and alternative network access is now in place for most, we know how frustrating this is for anyone affected and we are disappointed that our suppliers haven’t yet been able to resolve the network problems in full. We continue to work with them to return services to normal.”