British Library knocked offline by weekend cyberattack

The British Library has been deed by a awesome IT outage affecting its website and galore of its services pursuing a "cyber incident" that impacted its systems connected Saturday, October 28.

The ongoing outage besides affects different services, including our telephone lines and on-site room services successful London and Yorkshire.

The British Library's facilities, including Reading Rooms for individual study, are still operational, and postulation items requested connected aliases earlier October 26 are accessible onsite.

"The British Library is experiencing a awesome exertion outage, arsenic a consequence of a cyber incident. This is affecting online systems and services, our website, and onsite services including our Reading Rooms," a spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

"We are investigating nan incident pinch nan support of nan National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and cybersecurity specialists."

The spokesperson didn't opportunity if individual aliases financial accusation belonging to customers aliases labor was accessed aliases stolen during nan incident.

The room has besides yet to supply specifications connected nan quality of nan onslaught and really nan malicious actors breached its systems. The British Library website was still offline owed to nan cyberattack erstwhile nan article was published.

The British Library says that while location is constricted manual ordering of postulation items successful London done printed catalogs successful St Pancras, location is nary entree to integer collections aliases nan integer catalog, and accumulation tickets tin only beryllium bought onsite utilizing cash.

"Our Fantasy accumulation and nationalist spaces will unfastened arsenic normal and our nationalist events will beryllium going up arsenic planned, but we are only capable to return rate costs connected site," it said connected Sunday.

The room says its postulation includes much than 150 cardinal items stored connected 625 km of shelves, pinch 3 cardinal added yearly arsenic it receives copies of each publication produced successful nan UK and Ireland.

Over 11 cardinal learners sojourn nan library's website annually, while much than 16,000 group usage its collections regular (on-site and online).