US hospitals cancel surgeries and doctor appointments due to global computer outage

NBC News

Several major US hospitals were forced to cancel surgeries and medical appointments on Friday amid the global computer outage.

Hospital workers in New York and Boston said they were unable to access some medical records or had trouble knowing where to send critically ill patients because several operating rooms had been shut down.

“We have a very carefully laid out plan every day to organize our resources,” said one employee at a New York hospital that was affected. “All of that was rendered useless,” said the employee, who asked not to be identified because she was not authorized to speak on behalf of the health system.

“The entire hospital is affected,” said an employee at Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston. “Today they have asked patients to stay home until further notice, and we are not able to access virtual visits either.”

Dana-Farber is part of the larger Mass General Brigham hospital system, which tweeted that “due to the severity” of the ruling, it was canceling all non-emergency surgeries, procedures and doctor visits.

The Dana-Farber employee added that staff scheduled for today were instructed to report to work but were unable to access patients’ medical records.

“They said they had found a solution, but they had to go to each computer in the hospital individually to get it up and running,” the employee explained.

The healthcare sector is no stranger to massive computer failures.

In recent years, American hospitals and other medical facilities have faced near-constant cyberattacks from ransomware hackers, often based in Russia, who attempt to lock down victim company computers and demand payment in bitcoins in exchange for code that could make them work again. Hospitals hit by ransomware are often quick to resort to practical solutions to help patients, such as handwriting notes and prescriptions.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said the latest issue was not an attack but the result of a routine software update that accidentally introduced a devastating bug to Windows computers.

Friday’s troubles extended far beyond Boston.

A message on the website of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said that “systems issues” had led the center to “pause the start of any procedures requiring anesthesia.”

The University of Miami Health System warned patients to expect delays while its IT teams worked to get computers back up and running. Until then, the facility would operate as in the old days with “the use of paper orders to disseminate information,” the hospital said in a statement on Facebook.

A letter to Northwell Health employees in New York sent shortly before 9 a.m. ET indicated that the hospital system was also experiencing issues associated with the outage.

“Given the widespread nature of the impact, we have activated our system emergency operations center to coordinate our response,” Northwell management wrote.

Duke University Health System in Durham, North Carolina, said “critical IT functions at our hospitals and clinics have been impacted,” but added that the clinics remained open.

However, other hospitals have not been affected at all or have only experienced minor service disruptions.

Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital said in a statement that despite “overnight outages,” it had not experienced any significant impact on patient care.

Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus said in a statement that while it had experienced some technological issues, “here is our current status: All of our facilities are open.”