Outsourcing firm Capita says ‘no evidence’ data compromised by cyber incident

The company, which is a major contractor for local authorities, said the incident on Friday caused ‘disruption’ to some services.

Capita is a major contractor for local authorities (Alamy/PA)

Outsourcing firm and Government contractor Capita has said there is “no evidence” that any data was compromised after a cyber incident last week left staff unable to access systems.

The company, which is a major contractor for local authorities, said the incident on Friday caused “disruption” to some services provided to clients.

It is understood that companies that use Capita for call centre services, such as O2, were affected by the incident.

Local authorities, such as Barnet Council in London, also reported that the IT issue impacted some customer service lines.

The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised

Capita statement to stock market

On Monday, Capita said the IT failure primarily affected “access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications”.

The firm added: “This caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, though the majority of our client services remained in operation.”

The group’s security monitoring “swiftly alerted” it to the incident and technical crisis management protocols were then put in place, it said.

“Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue,” the group added, in a statement to the stock market.

“The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised.”

It has now restored Capita staff access to Microsoft Office 365 and is “making good progress” in restoring remaining client services.