Kerala Government undeterred by Microsoft outage, thanks to Ubuntu

Thiruvananthapuram: At a time when various sectors all over the world were affected by the Microsoft outage, the Kerala Government activities remained unaffected, thanks to Ubuntu, the free software. 

Computers in the Kerala Government office network run on an operating system based on Ubuntu. However, the functioning of the IT companies using the Microsoft operating system and the cloud was severely affected. 

As the state government's data centre and the security software used on it were not associated with Microsoft, they were not affected by the outage. 

The cloud system used by the government during emergency phases also was not that of Microsoft. The computers used for daily operations in government offices are based on independent software. Hence there was no disruption to e-office systems or e-treasury. 

Most of those nominal systems functioning on Microsoft were also not affected by the outage, informed the authorities.

Meanwhile, computers in many institutions at Technopark have not been working since Thursday night. The operation resumed only on Friday afternoon.

The operations of major banks and ATM networks were also not disrupted in the State. However, in some hospitals, computer outages caused chaos.