Veterans Affairs Medical Center Faces Technical Failure Due to Cat Incident
Veters Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, encountered a four-hour failure because of a cat that suddenly jumped on the equipment keyboard.
According to sources, the incident occurred in September during one of the regular calls between the US government department and the Center IT director to discuss urgent problems in the IT sector. Typically, about 100 specialists participate in such discussions, including contractors, suppliers, and employees.
In one of these calls, the technician said that during the check of the server cluster configuration, his cat suddenly jumped onto the keyboard, which led to data deletion. In any case, this was the version of the technique with which he shared with The Register.
The official statement of the center reads: “On September 13, 2023, the Medical Center in Kansas City was faced with the problem of transmitting images in the system vista (Veters Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, a system of electronic medical records of veterans) due to accidental removal of server profiles. The problem was quickly detected and eliminated for four hours. The incident has no direct consequences for veterans.”
There was no mention of the Cat Veterans Department of Veterans, and the department did not comment on the version with the cat. At the moment, it remains only to guess the real cause of the incident, where the cat is simultaneously present and absent in different versions of history.