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germany's federal statistical office (destatis) has been forced to suspend the release of a series of key economic indicators due to "it failures and changes in data processing methods."

the german economy is facing a major data disruption. the federal statistical office has not updated its figures for retail and wholesale sales, as well as data on services, the hotel industry, car dealer revenues and more.

these economic indicators are an important basis for measuring the health of the german economy. the suspension of their release has caused data economists, policymakers and investors to fall into an information blind spot.

the statistics office said the data interruption stemmed from a 2019 eu directive requiring improved statistical methods. however, technical problems and data processing delays meant that important indicators had not been updated for four months.

a key complication is that in the past, if a company was engaged in both services and manufacturing, its revenue was lumped together based on which sector the company was more heavily involved in. but now, revenue from each industry needs to be reported separately, a change that has made economic data reporting more complicated.

52.7% of germany's output depends on private consumption, while retail sales account for 28% of private consumption. since may this year, the federal statistical office has not released relevant data, making it difficult to assess the state of consumer demand in germany. the german federal statistical office has to rely on pre-sales tax data from retail companies to estimate private consumption instead of retail sales. this has affected the gdp data for the second quarter.

economists expressed concern about this. deutsche bank chief economist robin winkler said germany "has been operating almost blindly in the services sector for several months."

it is worth noting that the delay in data updates not only affected economists' analysis, but also made the public feel that the efficient system that germany was originally proud of was failing.

commerzbank chief economist jörg krämer said:

"in the past, there were some aspects of life that you could rely on, and official statistics being published on time was one of them, but that is no longer the case."

the federal statistical office acknowledged that users' complaints were legitimate and said it would do its best to restore the normal cycle of data release as soon as possible.