For the past week, visitors to Alexandria libraries found many of the services inaccessible thanks to an outage “due to a data incident.”
While the incident was severe enough that the library contacted both cybersecurity professionals and law enforcement, Senior Communications Officer Nathan Carrick said because the investigation is ongoing, the library could not comment on the cause of the outage, what “data incident” entails, and whether or not the outage was the result of a cyber attack.
According to a statement sent by Carrick:
As indicated on our website, the Alexandria Library system is currently experiencing a network outage due to a data incident. As soon as we became aware of the situation, the Library’s leadership immediately engaged cybersecurity professionals and contacted law enforcement to remediate and investigate this incident. The investigation of that incident is ongoing and we will make additional information about library services available as soon as is practical.
Last week, services like signing up for a library card or borrowing e-books and audiobooks through the Libby app were restricted. Carrick said some of those services have been restored, but access to public computers and public printing are still unavailable.
The Library is open and customers are encouraged to come check out books, attend in-person programs, and participate in our summer reading program. A number of important services have been restored, such as access to the public wi-fi, the Library catalog and borrowing of e-books and e-audiobooks through the Libby app. We are working diligently to restore other services such as access to public computer stations and public printing which are unavailable. We are encouraging patrons who need these services to take advantage of the reciprocal cardholder agreement we have with most other library systems in the DC metropolitan area.