Major NHS belief declares ‘vital incident’ attributable to Microsoft outage
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An NHS hospital has declared a ‘critical incident’ after the Microsoft‘s global outage rendered it incapable of delivering treatment to cancer patients.
Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust said the ongoing IT chaos that erupted this morning had left it ‘unable to deliver our scheduled radiotherapy treatments’.
Critical incidents are declared when an NHS body experiences such a level of disruption that it can’t deliver critical services to patients and requires special measures or assistance from other agencies.
In an update the trust said while its radiotherapy services had been hit this morning it had regained the ability to provide them this afternoon.
However, the critical incident would remain in place and the Trust warned the disruption could affect appointments into next week.
The global Microsoft outage has hit vital NHS services, according to reports that medical computer system EMIS is not working
Health Secretary Wes Streeting today urged the public to ‘bear with’ medics grappling with the IT outage
It comes as cancer patients needing chemotherapy in Manchester were also caught up in the IT chaos and forced to skip their scheduled appointments.
GP services up and down the country have borne the brunt of the Microsoft outage due to their reliance on the EMIS system.
This system is used by GPs to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals.
Some 3,700 GP practices in England are thought to be affected by the outage, about two thirds of nation’s primary care providers.
Practice managers have told MailOnline they were essentially ‘dead in the water’.
One, working in Berkshire, said: ‘We can’t see any patients our systems are down. It’s not clinically safe to treat patients because we can’t see their notes.’
Health Secretary Wes Streeting today said: ‘Please bear with your local GPs if they’re grappling with this on top of normal pressures,’ he said.
He added: ‘My department is working closely with colleagues across government.’
Salisbury District Hospital, part of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, has also been hit by outage with a spokesperson stating it had affected multiple aspects of its operations.
‘The challenge is around our patient administration system. It means that we’ve gone to manual registration of new patients,’ they said,
‘This is in the emergency, maternity and other front door services where people present directly at the hospital. That process is now slow rather than being digital.
‘One of the systems is the system used for rostering staff, which is done six weeks in advance, so we’re not seeing any staff shortages at the moment.
‘However, we’re using paper systems to allocate cover.’
NHS Blood and Transplant, which organises blood donations for the health service issued an urgent appeal for all donors to keep attending any scheduled appointments.
A spokesperson said: ‘NHS Blood and Transplant are calling on donors to book and keep appointments to donate blood to boost NHS resilience at this time.’
‘There remains a particularly urgent need for O negative blood.
GTD Healthcare, a major UK healthcare provider in the North West of England which uses the system, said its services had been impacted by the outage
‘Blood donation systems are not affected and we currently have a high number of appointments available at our donor centres in major towns and cities, including London, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham.’
The Department of Health for Northern Ireland also said its hospitals had also been affected, alongside two thirds of GP practices.
‘The impacts currently include hospital services – for example booking patients into operating theatres, accessing staff rosters, capturing digital endoscopy images and operating radiotherapy services as well as some primary care services, ‘ its statement read.
Speaking to this website this morning a GP practice manager in Berkshire said the outage had made it unsafe to see patients.
‘We can’t see any patients our systems are down. It’s not clinically safe to treat patients because we can’t see their notes,’ they said.
‘Can’t give out prescriptions and even if we do hand write them the problem is also affecting the pharmacies. It’s affecting the whole area and hospitals are in an even worse situation.’
Another GP practice, based in South West London, said they had lost ‘100 per cent’ of their clinical systems and as such were having to turn away patients and direct others to the NHS 111 service. Other GPs in London reported similar issues.
In a statement NHS North West London said: ‘Some of our general practice IT systems are impacted by an IT outage.
‘The clinical computer systems used by our GPs in Brent, Harrow, Hillingdon, Dormers Wells practice in Ealing and Spring Grove practice in Hounslow are currently unable to access patient records, including telephone numbers and email addresses.
‘Telephone appointments may not be possible until this matter is resolved.’
Patients also told MailOnline they were struggling to access lifesaving drugs and care.
Father Grant Ciccone, from Deptford in South East London, said he is unable to get any more of the insulin he needs to keep his type 1 diabetes under control and was ‘very worried’.
‘I cannot order insulin which I need to keep me alive. I have run out of two types of insulin which I need,’ he said.
Another primary care provider Solihull Healthcare Partnership, said its ability to book appointments would be affected by the EMIS outage
‘Don’t know when I will be able to get a prescription as the GP website is down as well and no one is answering the phone.’
An NHS England spokesperson confirmed the problem, stating: ‘The NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, which is causing disruption in the majority of GP practices.’
‘The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP.
‘There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would.’
‘There are also some issues with administrative systems in hospitals that mean staff are having to work manually from paper to manage certain tasks but in the majority of hospitals, care is continuing as normal.
They added that patients should continue to attend appointments unless told otherwise.
Wilmslow Health Centre urged people to be patient with GPs today as the fault with the IT system was out of their hands
MailOnline has contacted EMIS for comment.
But an alert issued by the company to GPs this morning, seen by this website, said: ‘We are aware that users are still unable to access EMIS Web’.
‘We are affected by a third-party issue that is impacting organisations globally, and we are working with the relevant parties to restore service as soon as possible.
‘Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this is causing. We will continue to keep you updated as this work progresses.’
The IT fault, which started last night, has caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to suddenly turn off at airports, grounding flights and knocking TV channels, airports and banks offline.
US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error, as they report on their website they are ‘working on it’.
Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologising for the ‘disruption’ to the service at 6am when broadcasting was meant to begin.
It read: ‘We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.’
Ryanair has also seemingly been hit with the issue after it posted on its website urging passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a ‘third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network’.
The issue is impacting companies globally with online reports that Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, the US and the UK have all been affected.
Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high-profile clients.
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.
