BT systems crash - Code Red attack suspected

NEWS BT suffered a humiliating systems crash earlier today as call-centre servers and databases fell victim to a suspected Code Red attack. Systems in the telco's international directory inquiries went down at 8:30am BST. An official BT spokesman investigating the fault told silicon.com that he was unable to get information on the problem because he was suffering an outage himself and was unable to access the internet or email. "Everything has crashed today. I believe we've been hit with the Code Red virus," he said. An employee at BT international directory inquiries said: "We've been told we have been hit by a virus and it's bought down all our servers and databases. "We have no idea when it will be fixed. It's affected every BT call centre and the technicians are still working on it but there is no specific time for the systems to be up again," he added. BT was forced to try to hook up international calls by getting hold of local directory services at the other end. So, for example, when calling Italy it attempted to link to Telecom Italia's local directory. This process proved unreliable at best and unsuccessful customers will be reimbursed the 40p charge for dialing "153". Another BT spokesman later told silicon.com that the telco had experienced problems because of the process to put a "very sophisticated anti-virus system in place and as a result of this our services were slowed down". He admitted that BT "may have" incurred some financial loss due to "153 being hampered". "All systems are now back up and running," he claimed. However a quick call to '153' confirmed this was not the case, and operators were recommending to try them again tomorrow.