British Library Cyber Attack: More Services Restored

The British Library has issued a new update on its recovery from last year's cyber attack in October 2023 which affected virtually every section of its service.

Chief Executive Roly Keating, who will be leaving his post in April 2025, reports that the National Newspaper Building in Boston Spa in the north of England – which holds 750 million pages of newspapers and periodicals dating back to the 18th century – has now reopened which meant the library has now restored access to 100% of its printed collections that were available before the criminal attack.

"It marks the culmination of a busy month which has seen a rapid sequence of service restorations of different kinds," Keating said in a statement. "All of these are workarounds and remain somewhat different to our pre-attack offering, but together they represent a significant step forward after a very disrupted year, and I’d like once again to thank our users for your patience and understanding as we’ve addressed this major work of rebuilding and restoration."

Remote ordering is also now available again rather than using paper slips onsite, and last week the library restored access to its digitised manuscripts archive. "It’s been great to make a first tranche of these unique treasures accessible to users around the world once again," said Keating. "More digitised manuscripts will be added to the site as we proceed with the careful work of data recovery.

"Alongside all of this, we are also deep into planning the next phase of our recovery programme, which will take us into the new year. Areas of particular focus include our sound archive and our popular and much-missed Ethos resource of 600,000 digitised theses."

Work is still ongoing on bringing in a new end-to-end platform for all British Library services which is hoped will provide a better and more integrated service than before the attack.