The Kerala government use Ubuntu software and all the official networking is run on its operating system (Image: X@ Chief Secretary, Government of Kerala)

When the whole world was outraged by the digital malfunction in the Microsoft system, the Kerala government services and its IT infrastructure remained unshaken as the officials uses an independent software-based computer network. This move rescued Kerala when other state governments and services like airports, BPOs and banks were suffering from the crisis.

The government’s data centre or security software hasn’t been connected to Microsoft therefore such international problems will not affect the Kerala government by any means. As per the reports, the government cloud system which is functioned to be used in case of an emergency is also not a part of Microsoft.

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The Kerala government use Ubuntu software and all the official networking is run on its operating system. This software was developed by Canonical company in England and many other independent developers contribute to Ubuntu for free. The first version of Ubuntu was released in 2004 and it releases a new version every six months.

The Kerala government have already undertaken a mission to encourage the use of Ubuntu in government schools and other sectors as it is reliable and has no previous issues aligned with data theft or system default. Since it was used for day-to-day official dealings and online services there was no disruption reported to the office’s ongoing operations and the transactions at the E-Treasury. However, the IT companies in Kerala were disrupted by the outage as the system used Microsoft software to do online operations.

It was on Friday, that a raft of major global institutions including banks, airlines and media organisations confronted mass IT outages and it was reported that the US State of Alaska service was affected and even the London Stock Exchange was also reportedly impacted. Later Microsoft announced that the company would fix the issues at the earliest.

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