Human error caused Mumbai outage, no role of Chinese hackers: Power minister

AFTER RK SINGH’S REMARKS, MAHARASHTRA MINISTER SAYS WILL TABLE HIS PROBE REPORT IN ASSEMBLY TODAY

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: A power outage in Mumbai in October 2020 was caused by “human error”, not cyber attack, Union power minister RK Singh told a news agency on Tuesday, a day after reports suggested Chinese government-linked actors were targeting Indian critical infrastructure.

Shortly after Singh’s comments, Maharashtra’s power minister Nitin Raut said a report of an investigation by the state into the incident will be tabled in the assembly on Wednesday, without revealing what the findings were.

“Two teams investigated the power outage and reported that the outage was caused by human error and not due to cyber attack.

One of the teams submitted that cyber attacks did happen but they were not linked to the Mumbai grid failure,” said Singh, while speaking to ANI.

“Cyber attacks happened on our northern and southern region load dispatch centres. However, the malware could not reach our operating system. Maharashtra home minister has informed that cyber-attacks happened on their Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system in Mumbai,” the minister added.

In Mumbai, Raut said he will table in the assembly on Wednesday all the reports on the October 12 outage, which lasted up to 12 hours in some parts of India’s financial capital, bringing the city’s local trains to a halt and forcing the airport to switch to back-up supply.

Responding to Union minister Singh’s “human error” remark, he said: “Let them say what they want to. Wait for their reactions after I table the findings in the assembly.”