The British Library has suffered a “cyber incident” that has caused a major, multi-day IT outage. The famous library, home to Magna Carta, began reporting issues on the morning of October 28 via social media, stating that its website and services at the St Pancras site in central London as well as in Yorkshire were affected. “This is affecting our website, online systems and services, and some onsite services including public Wi-Fi,” it posted on X. The library said it is currently investigating the incident with the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and other specialists.
The library’s said its buildings remain fully open and the following services are available onsite:
- Reading Rooms (for personal study)
- Any collection items ordered on or before 26 October
- Very limited, manual collection item ordering in London via our printed catalogues, for items stored in St Pancras only
The cause and nature of the incident are not currently known. According to a source, the issue started at around 07:30 on October 28 and was in part due to “major issues” with the library’s VMware ESXi servers that have made nearly all their VMs unavailable, according to The Register. A ransomware attack earlier this year targeted a vulnerability in VMware ESXi servers.
“Please bear with us while we gather more information. We’ll update as regularly as we can,” the library wrote. The library’s website remained inaccessible at the time of writing.
CSO has contacted the NCSC for comment but has not yet received a response.
