Biohacking
Microsoft outage hit NHS email but clinical systems held
By John Hyland, . Life and Health Today.
A major Microsoft outage that began around 6pm on Thursday disrupted email and Teams communications across the NHS, police forces, schools and businesses in 74 countries, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, which recorded Outlook problem reports at more than two thousand times their usual rate within a single hour.
Microsoft said it was working "with urgency" on a full fix and that services were being gradually restored, though some users could still face intermittent problems.
What stayed up and what went down
NHS England said staff were falling back on paper records and alternative systems, measures it described as long-standing protocols for IT failures. Patients were told to keep attending appointments unless contacted otherwise, to call 999 in emergencies, and to use 111 or a local pharmacy for other concerns.
Sir Ciarán Devane, chief executive of the NHS Alliance, told Medscape the situation "appears that all clinical and operational systems are working effectively," with email the main casualty. Several trusts confirmed the same picture. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust reported its clinical systems were unaffected. Bristol NHS Foundation Trust said patients did not need to phone ahead. Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust said its teams were unable to send or receive email but that services and planned procedures were continuing. University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust asked patients to phone rather than email.
Where delays did appear
Pharmacies were hit harder. The National Pharmacy Association warned that the outage had limited pharmacies' ability to communicate with GP practices and some patients, and that longer waits and prescription delays were likely.
The GMB union said the disruption was creating what Rachel Harrison, the union's national secretary, called a "massive backlog" in ambulance and NHS trust work, with "the potential for chaos." Harrison added that emergency and life-threatening call-outs "appear to be unaffected."
What this episode shows
The outage is a reminder of how much health system communication now runs through a single commercial platform. Clinical systems and emergency call-handling held up in this instance, but the gap between those systems and the administrative layer, email, referrals, prescription queries, was wide enough to cause real delays for patients waiting on prescriptions. Whether NHS trusts' paper-based fallback plans would hold under a longer or deeper outage is a question this episode raises without answering.
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