A major global IT outage is affecting industries across the world – including the Northern Ireland health service (HSC).
Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike says a “defect” in one of its software updates hit Windows operating systems, a system used by the Health Service in NI.
A spokesperson for HSC said: “We can confirm that the global IT issues are resulting in a number of impacts on Health and Social Care services in Northern Ireland.
“The impacts are continuing to be collated, assessed and responded to urgently, patient care remains the priority and all HSC organisations continue to deliver services to patients as best as possible while the IT issues are fixed.
“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.
“Around two thirds of GP practices across Northern Ireland use an IT system that has been affected, this means that these practices are unable to access their clinical system to view and update patient records, and cannot generate routine patient prescriptions and test requests or see results of laboratory tests. The affected practices will be operating on an emergency appointment basis only until the IT issues are resolved.
“The issues are not a result of core HSC operated technologies being affected, but third party systems operated by suppliers that use the impacted technology product. Impacted HSC services and teams are being asked to temporarily invoke the plans they have in place for continuing business without some of their IT systems, including reverting to established paper based processes where necessary.
“HSC technology teams are working intensively with third party vendors to rectify the issue by removing the impacted component and will continue bringing systems back to normal during the course of the day, as well as working with operational teams to find and fix impacted services. It is not currently understood to be caused by a cyber attack.
“All emergency care services will continue to be provided and the public should attend appointments and access services as normal unless advised not to by service providers like their hospital or GP. Those who are contacting HSC organisations today are asked to be patient at this challenging time.
“If any patients require an urgent supply of their regular prescription medicines (excluding Controlled Drugs Schedules 1,2&3) and are unable to get a prescription from their GP, they should contact their local community pharmacist to obtain the medication.”
