Malmö accidentally 'sacks' 4,800 employees
The Local Sweden - [email protected]
Published: 9 Jan, 2019 CET.
Updated: Wed 9 Jan 2019 20:12 CET
Malmö’s municipal government accidentally laid off 4,800 of its employees during an update to its IT systems, leaving then unable to log into their computers or emails.
The update, carried out on Tuesday evening, marked the employment of a full 20 percent of the municipality’s employees as ‘ended’, with the system then sending automatic emails to each of their superiors informing them that the employees no longer worked for the city.
“It’s been a difficult day,” Marcus Christensson, department head at the municipality, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper on Wednesday. “A whole load of accounts disappeared from the system.”
He said that the IT experts had been unable to bring the system back to how it was before the update, but had instead had to change all of the employees statuses manually.
He stressed that he did not believe that any data had been lost: “This is not about storage. This is about the right to come into the system. It’s a door key, but the furniture is still there in the house.”
Throughout Wednesday morning, the city’s IT staff had returned user privileges to more and more of the employees, beginning with the most critical positions.
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The update, carried out on Tuesday evening, marked the employment of a full 20 percent of the municipality’s employees as ‘ended’, with the system then sending automatic emails to each of their superiors informing them that the employees no longer worked for the city.
“It’s been a difficult day,” Marcus Christensson, department head at the municipality, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper on Wednesday. “A whole load of accounts disappeared from the system.”
He said that the IT experts had been unable to bring the system back to how it was before the update, but had instead had to change all of the employees statuses manually.
He stressed that he did not believe that any data had been lost: “This is not about storage. This is about the right to come into the system. It’s a door key, but the furniture is still there in the house.”
Throughout Wednesday morning, the city’s IT staff had returned user privileges to more and more of the employees, beginning with the most critical positions.
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