British, Toronto Libraries Struggle After Cyber Incidents

As the national library of the UK, the British Library has a collection of more than 150 million items, including books, films, and manuscripts. But the library is struggling with major outages affecting its website and services after a late October cyberattack.

The library reported that some on-site services such as Wi-Fi were affected; however, its buildings remain open and certain on-site services are still available.

"We're currently investigating the incident with @NCSC and other specialists," according to a British Library post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

On the same day of the cybersecurity incident at the British Library, the Toronto Library reported it had experienced its own. In a website update posted today, the library noted that due to the incident there, certain services such as personal accounts, map passes, digital collections, public computers, and printing services were unavailable. 

Though the Toronto Library is still open as scheduled, it states that it anticipates the process of becoming fully operational again may take several days.

It's unknown whether the two cyber incidents are connected.