Capita confirms cyber hack as cause of IT failures

UK government outsourcer Capita confirmed Capita a cyber-attack was the cause of a major outage of technology services for clients on Friday.

The company, which holds contracts for clients from the National Health Service to the UK military and local councils, on Monday said it was still working to restore services.

“On Friday 31st March, Capita experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications,” the company said in a statement.

Those applications include products ranging from email to spreadsheets and the now ubiquitous Teams app that operates virtual office meetings.

“This caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, though the majority of our client services remained in operation,” Capita added, without naming any of the customers affected, although Barnet Council in North London said phone lines for benefits, council tax and business rates call centres were down.

Capita added that there was no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com