Outlook better still be down on Monday fume office workers

'I was going to blame this outage for the fact I haven't done any work for most of the last 6 months.' said office worker Gary Grimthwaite, who loathes his job, both privately and publicly.

'I bet those dweebs will be in at the weekend fixing it too, so on Monday morning I'll be able to work as normal. I wonder how long I could claim it still isn't working for me. I reckon I could buy at least a day. There's a Bergerac double bill later.'

IT Manager Amy Armstrong said, 'It's a worldwide problem, so I can't do anything about it. Apart from claiming the overtime for supposedly working on a solution. And the credit for turning our servers off and on again.'

CEO Clementine Carruthers fumed, 'This just proves that working from home is morally wrong. The plebs should be in an office where I can secretly monitor them on CCTV from my yacht in international waters. What is Outlook anyway? I do all my communication on the Dark Web. Nothing dodgy.'

Carruthers' PA sighed, 'I changed the background colour of her laptop to black and told her it was the Dark Web. And she's definitely going to jail.'

Picture credit: Wix AI

Family of 14 evicted from on-line fulfilment centre

A family of 14, including two great-grandparents, have been evicted from a high-tech warehouse in Sunderland.

The warehouse is owned and operated by a well-known on-line retailer who has, amazingly, asked not to be named.  We are able to say, however, that the warehouse is in a prime location.

The retailer said that the family had got in by mailing themselves to the warehouse, pretending to be returned goods.  Once inside, they hacked the stock control system to make certain racks unavailable for use.  They then lived in the racking, unnoticed, hiding behind dusty pallets of unsold Boris Johnson books.   They survived by eating cardboard and returned corn-and-potato based snacks.   For entertainment, they challenged each other to wear a blindfold and work out which was which.

Six members of the family were subsequently hired by the retailer, even though they gave their home address as that of the warehouse.  They worked regular shifts for over a year, and one of them won employee of the month three times.  Despite this, the family was made to leave, and all six employees were sacked.  Two family members escaped the eviction process by despatching themselves to a pick-up locker nearby.

The retailer said that it would not prosecute the family as company policies didn’t directly cover the circumstances.   A spokesman confirmed that IT security would be tightened and company policies updated.

Although there was some damage to copies of ‘Unleashed’ there was no financial loss as they were already unsaleable and worthless.

Train delays due to 'nationwide comms fault', not Russian hackers

Recent chaos on the railways was just down to comforting old bumbling British inefficiency and nothing to do with Russian cyber attacks, according to a government spokesman.

‘It’s definitely not a cyberattack by a hostile foreign state.  We are so well-prepared for that, it’s not true.   Definitely.  Not true.

‘Investigations are underway.  We expect the problem is down to some agency staff member in IT who missed out a minus sign.  Or spilt their tea on the server.  Or forgot to do the back-up.  Or somebody cut through a critical power line.  Or something overheated.  Or because key software is running on Windows 3.1, or a ZX81 or something.   But not a Russian hack.  Definitely.

‘I must protest about the media frenzy that claims this is down to foreign hackers.   There’s an effing D notice on that, for god’s sake.   It’s just an ordinary, boring, every day cock-up.   All those ThikTok people are trying to whip up another stupid QAnon/AlAnon/OnAnOn conspiracy theory.  It’s all TikTokTosh.   NOT A HACK.  Got that?’

We approached Great British Railways for a comment, but their phones were down.