Carolyn Dever, How to Lose a Library at Public Books – the best thing I’ve read on the ongoing and very serious British Library problems (via @nescio13 on X/Twitter)

What’s business as usual at the Victoria and Albert Museum is far from the case fewer than four miles away, at the United Kingdom’s national public repository, the British Library. At the British Library, hopeful would-be readers of the library’s prodigious catalogue of unique, rare, and contemporary materials are out of luck.

On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. Moreover, the cyberattack also swept the personal data of the British Library’s humans—its users, but, far more extensively, its staff—into the hands of an outside party. During the final week of November, images of the stolen data were presented for auction on the dark web, for sale to whoever’s willing to pay 20 bitcoin, or about £600,000. By making the library’s digital infrastructure into a commodity (in an open, albeit dark, market), a “ransomware gang” calling itself Rhysida hopes to pressure the British Library to pay up first.

Update 16 Dec 11am: after weeks of limited information, the British Library blog has been updated with a much more detailed statement from the chief executive. A phased return of some more services is due in the New Year.

Update 19 Dec: some good questions at The Edithorial

Update 22 Dec: there is a piece in The New Yorker