Sneak attack from feline friend wipes US government server with cat-astrophic impact — human technician cat-egorically denies involvement
The US government refuses to confirm or deny whether a cat was involved in the four-hour outage
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Working from home has its perils, but spare a thought for a technician at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, whose cat allegedly deleted an entire server cluster – leading to a four-hour outage last month.
The outage apparently happened while the technician was reviewing how a server cluster was configured, according tothe Register.
What they assumed was their feline friend turned foe, leaping onto the keyboard – unprompted – and accidentally wiping out the server, according to the agency’s CIO, Kurt DelBene, telling participants in a video conferencing call.
Shroedinger’s cat-astrophe
“This is why I have a dog,” DelBene, who is also assistant secretary for information and technology, was reported as saying.
There hasn’t yet been any official confirmation that a cat, indeed, had caused the outage – but the government did confirm an outage had happened.
“On September 13, 2023 the Kansas City VAMC [Veterans Affairs Medical Center] experienced an issue with image transfer within Vista due to an inadvertent deletion of server profiles,” the agency said, according to the publication.
“The issue was quickly identified and the system restored within four hours. There have been no further issues or direct impacts to veterans from this incident.”
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
When the Register pushed back, asking the Department of Veteran Affairs’ press secretary to confirm whether or not the cat was involved, they declined to comment.
While this is certainly a bizarre outage, the technician in question will, hopefully, get some respite from knowing he’s not alone.
This isn’t the first cat-related IT incident, after all, and is simply the latest in a string of bizarre outages recorded over the years. Level 3 Communications, for example, once attributed 17% of its fiber cuts to squirrels.
More from TechRadar Pro
Keumars Afifi-Sabet is the Technology Editor for Live Science. He has written for a variety of publications including ITPro, The Week Digital and ComputerActive. He has worked as a technology journalist for more than five years, having previously held the role of features editor with ITPro. In his previous role, he oversaw the commissioning and publishing of long form in areas including AI, cyber security, cloud computing and digital transformation.
A new form of macOS malware is being used by devious North Korean hackers
Ulefone Armor 27T Pro rugged phone review
I review TVs for a living and this record-low price on the Hisense U8N is one of the best early Black Friday deals I’ve seen
