FORGET cyber attacks and online ransom demands - a major outage at a medical facility in the USA has been blamed on a cat.
American political news site The Register has reported on the case of a four-hour system interruption at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, which has been attributed to a feline jumping onto a technician's keyboard at just the wrong moment.
The case came to light after a regular review of IT issues within US Government departments, during which one of the participants described the recent incident when a systems administrator was busily "reviewing the configuration of a server cluster".
The cat reportedly jumped onto the keyboard and hit the delete key, causing the major system shutdown which took some time to rectify.
It's understood that during the IT review another participant commented "this is why I have a dog, not a cat" prompting plenty of laughter from the other participants.
The Department of Veterans Affairs wasn't able to confirm the involvement of the mischievous feline, but did admit to an "inadvertent deletion of server profiles".
"The issue was quickly identified and the system restored within four hours, and there have been no further issues or direct impacts to veterans from this incident," the official statement noted.
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