Contractor overwhelmed by calls on Chinese hack of government employee data

The contractor hired to field inquiries about the Chinese hack of federal data and sign up employees for credit monitoring acknowledged that it was overwhelmed by calls in June.

But a spokesman for CSID, the company running three call centers under a contract with the Office of Personnel Management, said the breach’s aftermath was the most unusual it has dealt with. Multiple media reports inflated the estimate of active and former employees whose employment data is at risk, way above the government’s 4.2 million estimate.

Combine a universe of 14 million to 18 million people that media reports said were affected with federal employees’ high level of concern about their personal information created a situation in which “people started calling and asking a lot of general questions,” Patrick Hillmann, a spokesman for CSID, said on Wednesday.

“The press was saying the number was larger,” Hillmann said. “Every single employee who thought they might be affected starting calling the call centers. We couldn’t control the volume.”

OPM officials said last week the reports of 14 million to 18 million affected employees have not been verified.

Soon after CSID and its partner, Winvale, were hired by OPM to handle the response to the hack, customer service complaints began piling up. Employees flooded their members of Congress with complaints about telephone wait times of up to three hours, and crashing of Web sites to sign up online for identity protection services.

At hearings before Congress last week, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta told lawmakers she was as angry as they were at the contractor’s performance.

Hillmann said the company has “pivoted” to adjust to the high call volume by quadrupling the number of staff at the call centers to 400 from about from the 100 it started out with.

He said the Web site crashed, but for no longer than 30 minutes at a time. “Any Web site is prone to going down for periods of time.”

A total of 565,000 people had signed up for CSID’s service as of last week, about 15 percent of the employees whose personal data may have been compromised in the hack.