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And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage
Q: What happens when a one-disk-failure-tolerant RAID fails? A: So do new applicants
King's College London suffered its seventh consecutive day of IT woes today. According to our sources in Blighty's capital, this was down to a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) which was running virtualised systems failing during a hardware upgrade.
As KCL officials note, their IT systems department has been working 24/7 with suppliers to put the situation right.
"Substantial progress has been made over the weekend in recovering systems and the source of the problem has now been isolated," reported the IT bods. "Some systems are starting to recover, including the telephone system but there are ongoing issues with other systems, including the applications portal. Significant progress has also been made with the website although there may be isolated issues with certain links or pages."
We are unfortunately unable to offer a precise timescale for complete resolution at this time but we are keeping everyone informed about the situation and will continue to provide regular updates until the problem is resolved.
If prospective students are currently working to any King’s deadline then these will be extended to one week after systems are restored. Once the systems have recovered, the admissions team will be able to check the status of applications.
The Register understands the incident was entirely accidental, and not related to any miscreants attempting to dodge looming dissertation deadlines. While no data theft has taken place, unfortunately the severity of the outage is not trivial.
Among the many services affected are telephony, internal websites, shared drives, room booking, payroll, student records, purchasing, catering services bookings and more. Clinical trials have also been interrupted.
Information regarding sensitive drug trials and surgical procedures, as well as lists of treatments in randomised double-blind drug trials, were held on affected IT systems.
Information shared internally (and with The Register) reveals that the problem was a hardware issue. "As is our normal practice, there will be a full review once normal services are restored. The review will confirm the root cause(s) of the problem," cameth the mea culpa. ®