National Kronos outage affecting thousands of Fort Worth ISD employees, district says
Fort Worth Independent School District, which employs over 11,000 people, is one of the many businesses and organizations nationwide being affected by a ransomware attack that targeted a timekeeping service. The school district says there’s a collaborative effort among all its departments to ensure every employee receives their paycheck on time in its upcoming pay cycle.
Claudia Garibay, Fort Worth ISD’s executive director of external and emergency communications, said the school district was first made aware of the Kronos outage caused by hackers on Sunday evening, and since then, the district has been addressing the problem “the old-fashioned way.”
“We implemented a backup plan right away where no employee will lose any time that will affect their compensation,” Garibay said. “The plan pretty much is going back to the way we did things, where we keep a written record of their hours using a downloadable time card.”
Early in the week, the school district sent out messages to its employees to explain what was going on, including a Monday memo regarding the new and temporary means of timekeeping until the problem is fixed. Inside its schools and buildings, signs are posted to remind employees the service is down.
“We’re working with our division of technology to develop a time capture application that we’ll have here in the near future,” Garibay said, adding that the priority is maintaining communication with employees.
“It’s going to take a lot of cooperation between all departments, that includes HR, and includes IT departments,” Garibay said. “It takes a little army on the back-end to work on something like this. We’re all working together and trying to address this issue as best as we can.”
The ransom attack is attacking the company’s private cloud, and may last up to several weeks said Bob Hughes, the Ultimate Kronos Group’s executive vice president, in a blog post. It could affect millions of workers at companies across the United States.
“While we are working diligently, our Kronos Private Cloud solutions are currently unavailable. Given that it may take up to several weeks to restore system availability, we strongly recommend that you evaluate and implement alternative business continuity protocols related to the affected UKG solutions,” the post read. “We deeply regret the impact this is having on you, and we are continuing to take all appropriate actions to remediate the situation.”
