We are responding to a cyber security issue

We apologise for the inconvenience, and thank our residents for being flexible and understanding.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and Westminster City Council (WCC) – who share a number of IT systems and services as part of joint arrangements – are responding to a cyber security issue. These two boroughs also share some IT services with the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.  The incident was identified quickly at both RBKC and WCC on Monday morning (24 November), and the two authorities have been working closely together and with the help of specialist cyber incident experts and the National Cyber Security Centre, with the focus on protecting systems and data, restoring systems, and maintaining critical services to the public. 

We know a number of systems are impacted across both organisations, including phone-lines. If you have an emergency, you can contact the Council using the phone numbers at the top of our contacts page. We are diverting more resources to manage this incident and monitor emails and phone lines, and the councils have invoked business continuity and emergency plans to ensure we are still delivering critical services to residents, focusing on supporting the most vulnerable.

Today we are letting partners and residents know what has happened, we have already informed the Information Commissioners' Office, in line with following all the relevant protocols. We don’t have all the answers yet, as the management of this incident is still ongoing. But we know people will have concerns, so we will be updating residents and partners further over the coming days. At this stage it is too early to say who did this, and why, but we are investigating to see if any data has been compromised – which is standard practice. Our IT teams worked through the night yesterday and a number of successful mitigations were put in place, and we remain vigilant should there be any further incidents or issues. 

We apologise to residents for any inconvenience, and thank them for being flexible and understanding. People may see some delays in responses and the services we provide over the coming days. We will continue working with our cyber specialists and the NCSC to restore all systems as quickly as possible, and we will be in touch with more information as it becomes available. If there are any further changes to services, we will endeavour to keep everyone updated. For any queries about Westminster or Hammersmith and Fulham please speak directly to those organisations.