British Library suffers major outage due to cyberattack

Last weekend, the British Library suffered a cyberattack that caused a major IT outage, impacting many of its services.

The British Library is facing a major outage that impacts the website and many of its services following a cyber attack that took place on October 28.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s largest libraries. It is located in London and houses a collection of over 150 million items, including books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, music recordings, and films.

The outage also affects some on-site services, including the public Wi-Fi.

The library launched an investigation into the incident with the help of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and other experts.

“We’re experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber incident. This is affecting our website, online systems and services, and some onsite services including public Wi-Fi. We’re currently investigating the incident with @NCSC and other specialists.” reads a tweet published by the library.

The library announced that 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 library did not disclose technical details about the attack, at this time it is unclear if threat actors had access to the information of its employees and customers.

On October 28 another library, the Toronto Library announced they were addressing a cyber security incident.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, British Library)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.