At around 1130 GMT yesterday, users around the world started experiencing difficulties using Google services such as YouTube and Gmail. Despite this, Google’s status dashboard continued to indicate that everything was working fine for some time. Meanwhile, Google’s search engine appears to have continued to work normally. The problem was quickly traced to an outage […]
Fifteen years ago today, at 6am on Sunday 11th December 2005, the largest ever explosion and fire in peacetime Western Europe took place at the Buncefield Oil Storage Depot in Hemel Hempstead. Miraculously there were no fatalities, and only 60 casualties; but in every other sense the impact of the incident was huge. Summarising some
On This Day in History – The Buncefield Explosion Read More »
Whilst the news that Manchester United had been hit by a “sophisticated operation by organized cyber criminals” was widely reported on Saturday, little detail has emerged since. In particular, there has been no update to the club’s original statement that “We are not currently aware of any breach of personal data associated with our fans
Published in 2020 and 2019 respectively, these books are both very timely as we have all had to get to grips with epidemiology. Whilst there are hopeful signs that we may be close to finding a way out of the current Covid-19 pandemic; the threat of future pandemics remains very real. As the name suggests
On the evening of 18th of November 1987, 31 people died and many more were injured in a terrible fire in Kings Cross Underground station. As always in these blog posts, we should firstly remember the victims and the many others who were affected by the incident. Whilst the most obvious “cause” of the tragedy
We have often blogged about IT incidents within the banking sector and commented upon the frequency of these events; but how common are they? Since April 2018, UK banks have had to report “Operational and Security Incidents” affecting personal and business current accounts to the FCA if they reach any of the following thresholds: >
There hasn’t been a high-profile food product recall in the UK since the fatal listeria contamination at Good Food Chain/North Country Cooked Meats over a year ago. Overall it has been a pretty quiet time for the sector, but food recalls hit the headlines again yesterday when Diageo announced a recall of its new alcohol-free
Diageo Recalls Guinness Draught 0.0% Because of Possible Presence of Mould Read More »
On 6th November 2004 the 17:35 Paddington to Penzance train was derailed when it struck a parked car on a level crossing at Ufton Nervet, near Reading. Tragically the car driver, train driver and four passengers died at the scene; whilst another passenger died a few hours later in hospital. Fortunately though, this was the
On This Day in History – The Reading Train Crash Read More »
Following hot on the heels of the announcement of a £20m fine for BA, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a final penalty of £18.4m on Marriott International last Friday. Once again, this has been a long-running saga including, as with BA, the proposal last year of a much larger fine of £99m. It also brings
Information Commissioner Fines Marriott International £18.4m Read More »
