A cat jumped onto an IT specialist's keyboard and erased information from a government server. 

A four-hour system outage in September at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, was caused by a cat jumping onto a technician's keyboard. Writes about this The Register.

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This was reported by a source who heard the story at one of the regular routine meetings held by a US government department with the CIO, during which the latest problems in the field of information technology are discussed. These calls involve about 100 people at a time—contractors, suppliers and employees.

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At a meeting in mid-September, one participant reported that while a technician was sorting out the configuration of a server cluster, his cat jumped on the keyboard and removed it.

Kurt DelBene, assistant secretary for information technology and chief information officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in this regard: "That's why I got a dog." There was laughter in response and nothing more - it was a short report of the incident.

Such a problem is not unheard of. Anecdotes of cat data vandalism can be found on various online forums. One reporter had her cat run across her keyboard to get to a sunny spot by the window, and one of El Reg's editors suffered from similar problems.

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spokesman Terrence Hayes said: “On September 13, 2023, the Kansas City VAMC experienced an issue with transferring images to Vista due to the inadvertent deletion of server profiles. The problem was quickly discovered and the system was restored within four hours. There were no further problems or direct consequences for veterans as a result of this incident.”

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In this case, Vista does not mean the previously known Windows operating system from Microsoft, but the Veterans Health Information System Technology Architecture Imaging system, which is often written with a capital letter - VistA.

The VA statement does not mention the cat.

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