The honeymoon is over. The global IT outage is Sir Keir Starmer’s first crisis.
When the full enormity of the disaster became apparent, the prime minister was about to pull off his latest diplomatic coup: hosting Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy at a meeting of the cabinet.
Were the PM and senior ministers distracted by the VIP guest in Downing Street and too slow to react? Almost certainly. And to make matters worse, Leeds was ablaze after a night of rioting.
Global IT outage latest: Security firm CrowdStrike rules out cyber attack
At 8.45am, the Home Office said the government was not experiencing any IT issues. Really? That sounded like a complacent reaction and one that was soon proved to be wildly misleading.
The rest of the nation was certainly feeling the impact, from breakfast time onwards. And in many different ways affecting daily life.
Whether it was airport chaos caused by flight cancellations, cancelled trains, banking paralysed or near meltdown in the NHS – with GP and hospital appointments and prescription orders halted – just about everybody in the UK and all over the globe was affected.
Yet at first, there appeared to be muddle and confusion in Whitehall as to which government department was dealing with the crisis. Not us, said the Department of Health. Speak to the NHS, the department said.
Not us, said the Cabinet Office, it was the science department. Then it became clear that benefits payments by the Department of Work and Pensions could be frozen and not paid.
Before 10am the Liberal Democrats demanded a COBRA meeting, a demand the party is often ridiculed for making. This time, though, it seemed an entirely reasonable demand.
“The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised,” said Cabinet Office spokesperson Christine Jardine MP.
