IT outage will continue to affect NHS services for days, minister warns

Last week’s unprecedented global computer outage will continue to hit NHS services for days, a minister has told MPs.

Ellie Reeves said patients should still attend appointments despite the disruption, unless they were advised otherwise.

Flights were grounded, digital payments halted and TV stations knocked off air after an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed Microsoft Windows systems.

The chaos hit one-third of drug deliveries to pharmacies in England and impacted thousands of GP practices and hospitals across the country.

Ambulance services also reported a “huge” surge in demand as people struggled to access the NHS app, while some hospitals suffered administrative issues.

The Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust declared a critical incident and cancelled radiotherapy appointments.

Cabinet office minister Ms Reeves told MPs that NHS services expected to be operating at full capacity “in the next few days”.

The public should continue to contact their GPs and patients should attend appointments unless told not to, she said.

She also announced an investigation by the National Cyber Security Centre, which she said would work with the cabinet office to prevent future shutdowns.

Several NHS services nationwide, including five NHS trusts, were forced to declare critical incidents due to the disruption.

On Friday, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, laid bare the scale of the problem, saying: “Our members are telling us that today’s outage is causing considerable disruption to GP practice bookings and IT systems – practices using Emis IT systems appear to be particularly affected.

“Outages like this affect our access to important clinical information about our patients, as well as our ability to book tests, make referrals, and inform the most appropriate treatment plan.”

NHS services in London were already facing huge disruption following a cyberattack last month which hit pathology systems used by hospitals and GP practices in south London and left thousands of patient appointments cancelled.

Ms Reeves said the incident had shown “how dependent the modern world is on complex and interconnected IT systems and how essential preparedness of such events is.”

She added: “There has to be a comprehensive process to identify the lessons from this episode. I hope these will lead to improvements which may help prevent similar incidents and further improve our resilience system outages and the impact they can have.”

CrowdStrike, which provides cyberattack monitoring and protection for large businesses, said the problem had been caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”, adding that it did not constitute a security incident or a cyberattack.

The company’s stock value fell 12 per cent in early trading on Friday in the wake of what Elon Musk dubbed the “biggest IT fail ever”.