Albania's primary digital public services portal, e-Albania, will be temporarily unavailable from May 15 to May 18, 2025, as authorities conduct a scheduled technical upgrade — amid growing complaints from citizens and businesses already experiencing access issues.
The Albanian government has officially announced that the e-Albania portal will be taken offline for a planned maintenance and optimization process, beginning Thursday, May 15 at 22:00 and running through Sunday, May 18 at 08:00. According to the official notice, the downtime is part of a broader effort to improve the technological infrastructure underpinning Albania's online public services, with the goal of enhancing long-term performance and reliability for citizens and institutions alike.
The timing of the announcement has drawn attention, as thousands of Albanian citizens have already been reporting access difficulties with the platform for at least two days prior to the scheduled maintenance window. Users have been unable to retrieve essential civil documents — including personal and family certificates — through the portal, effectively blocking a chain of dependent applications. Services tied to e-Albania, such as those offered through the DIVA platform, the State Cadastre Agency, health card registrations, and social insurance verification, have all been impacted as a result. The cascading effect highlights the degree to which Albania's digital governance infrastructure has become deeply interconnected — and how vulnerable the broader public service ecosystem is when the central portal experiences disruption.
Businesses have not been spared either. Multiple reports indicate that the SelfCare platform, used widely by companies for managing electronic invoices and fiscal registration processes — a requirement under Albania's mandatory fiscalization law — has also been experiencing problems. For small and medium-sized enterprises, disruptions to fiscalization workflows can carry legal and financial implications, adding a layer of urgency to the situation beyond individual citizen inconvenience.
The Agency for the Delivery of Integrated Services Albania (ADISA), which oversees the e-Albania ecosystem, has not yet issued a detailed technical explanation for the issues reported in the days leading up to the announced maintenance. It remains unclear whether the pre-existing access problems are directly related to preparatory work for the upgrade, or represent a separate technical failure. Civil society observers and digital governance advocates have previously called for greater transparency around the reliability metrics of government digital platforms, particularly as Albania deepens its EU integration process, which places significant emphasis on the quality and accessibility of public e-services.