Behold the Power of Cats

The Kansas City VA system had a 4 hour computer outage because of keyboard cat.

Apparently, a tech was looking at server configuration when his cat jumped on the keyboard deleting the server keyboard configuration.

A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician's keyboard.

So we're told by a source, who heard the tale on one of the regular weekday calls held by the US government department with its CIO, during which recent IT problems are reviewed. We understand that roughly 100 people – contractors, vendors, and employees – participate in these calls at a time.

On a mid-September call, one of the participants explained that while a technician was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it. Or at least that's their story.

Kurt DelBene, assistant secretary for information and technology and CIO at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is said to have responded on the call with words to the effect that: "This is why I have a dog." There was laughter and not much more – it was a short incident report.

This is not an unheard of problem. Anecdotes of feline data vandalism abound in various online forums. This reporter has personal experience with typos introduced by an orange tabby conducting a keyboard crossing to reach a sunny spot by the window, and one of El Reg's editors has suffered similar issues.

You know, I'd put this down to random chance, but this happens way too frequently to be happenstance.

There is a massive conspiracy out there, and I don't know what it is, and I do not know what their goals are, but I do know that, much like the fog, it comes on little cat feet.