The Guardian has been hit by a serious IT incident, believed to be a ransomware attack.
The incident began late Tuesday night and affected parts of the company’s technology infrastructure, with staff told to work from home.
There was also some disruption to services behind the scenes.
Online publishing is largely unaffected, with stories continuing to be written and published on the Guardian website and app.
The company said it was confident it could still produce a print newspaper on Thursday.
News organizations around the world have been regular targets of cyberattacks by both criminals and nation states, although at this stage the company said it believed the incident was likely a ransomware attack. These include hackers gaining access to a computer system and then making requests to restore services.
Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson and editor-in-chief Catherine Viner told staff: “As everyone knows, there has been a serious incident affecting our IT network and systems over the past 24 hours. We believe this is a ransomware attack, but we are continuing to look into all possibilities.
“We continue to publish globally on our website and apps, and although some of our internal systems are affected, we are confident that we will be able to publish in print tomorrow.” Our technology teams are working to handle all aspects of this incident, with the majority of our staff able to work from home as we did during the pandemic.
“We will continue to inform our staff and anyone else affected. We will update everyone again at the end of the day. With a few key exceptions, we’d like everyone to work from home for the rest of the week unless we tell you otherwise.
“Thank you to everyone who is working hard during this incident to continue publishing, take care of our readers, supporters and advertisers, and keep our core systems available to colleagues.”
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