Outsourcing firm Capita reckons it is recovering from a “cyber incident” that started last Friday (31 March), that crippled its systems controlling contracts for the British government, the national health service and O2, among others.
Capita staff were unable to log into Microsoft Office 365 services, for instance.
The company said this morning: “Capita experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications. This caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, though the majority of our client services remained in operation.”
It added: “Our IT security monitoring capabilities swiftly alerted us to the incident, and we quickly invoked our established and practised technical crisis management protocols. Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue. The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised.”
It has so far not explained the cause of the problem, and may never do so publicly.
“Working in collaboration with our specialist technical partners, we have restored Capita colleague access to Microsoft Office 365 and we are making good progress restoring remaining client services in a secure and controlled manner.
“We will update the market further, should there be a need to provide any additional information, in due course.”
The incident comes a year after the British Army had to suspend recruitment activities, after a Capita system is believed to have been targeted by hackers.
