“Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Microsoft Corp. were blamed by the United Kingdom’s pension and benefits agency for a computer crash that snarled payments across Britain. About 80,000 of the 100,000 desktop computers in the Department for Work & Pensions were knocked out of service after a routine software upgrade earlier this week, the London agency said in a statement. The agency administers child support, unemployment and pension benefits,” Reed V. Landberg and Robert Hutton report for Bloomberg News.
“‘A piece of Microsoft software was uploaded’ to the department system on Monday, said Alex Flynn, spokesman for the Public & Commercial Services Union, which represents half of all civil service workers, including Work & Pensions staff. ‘That modernization went awry. Microsoft is saying it’s EDS’s fault. EDS is saying the Microsoft program didn’t upload properly,'” Landberg and Hutton report.
Full article here.
