Exclusive A four-hour system interruption in September on the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat leaping on a technician’s keyboard.
So we’re instructed by a supply, who heard the story on one of many common weekday calls held by the US authorities division with its CIO, throughout which recent IT issues are reviewed. We perceive that roughly 100 folks – contractors, distributors, and workers – take part in these calls at a time.
On a mid-September name, one of many contributors defined that whereas a technician was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it. Or at the very least that is their story.
Kurt DelBene, assistant secretary for data and expertise and CIO on the Department of Veterans Affairs, is claimed to have responded on the decision with phrases to the impact that: “This is why I’ve a canine.” There was laughter and never far more – it was a brief incident report.
This just isn’t an remarkable drawback. Anecdotes of feline knowledge vandalism abound in varied on-line boards. This reporter has private expertise with typos launched by an orange tabby conducting a keyboard crossing to achieve a sunny spot by the window, and one in every of El Reg‘s editors has suffered comparable points.
The late Boo was a Register disruptor throughout modifying
So we requested the Department of Veteran Affairs to substantiate the yarn. VA press secretary Terrence Hayes responded promptly with the next assertion:
“On September 13, 2023 the Kansas City VAMC [Veterans Affairs Medical Center] skilled a difficulty with picture switch inside Vista on account of an inadvertent deletion of server profiles. The problem was rapidly recognized and the system restored inside 4 hours. There have been no additional points or direct impacts to veterans from this incident.”
Vista, on this occasion, refers to not Microsoft’s much-maligned Windows working system of yore however to the VA’s Veterans Health Information System Technology Architecture Imaging system, usually rendered with a trailing capital, VistA. An set up information [PDF] supplied by the VA makes it clear that it will be no enjoyable to take care of cat-edited configuration information within the administration’s digital submitting system.
No point out was made from the cat within the VA’s assertion. And when The Register explicitly requested Hayes to substantiate the involvement of an issue with paws, he declined to remark. We knowledgeable him that we’d be reporting what we heard and to tell us if our supply’s account was in any means not purrfect.
We’ve not heard something farther from the VA, so we’re left with a Schrödinger’s cat state of affairs, the place the cat each exists and doesn’t exist in numerous tellings.
We observe that Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA), who can also be Kurt’s spouse, does report having a canine named Reily. Our supply stories that often the canine’s tail may be seen wagging into body throughout his video calls. ®
