Nottingham University Hospital suffered an IT outage on Halloween (Oct. 31) after a UPS failure.
According to posts on X/Twitter by Shaun Lintern, health editor of the Sunday Times, the outage was caused by a "serious power failure" in the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system.
The power outage brought down the hospital's IT systems and WiFi trust-wide and impacted the blood transfusion system, significantly slowing treatment and surgery.
The power was back on at the Hospital by 4:00 pm, October 31, having begun at 8:00 am that morning.
“During this time we reverted to our standard offline processes and acknowledge that there may have been delays as a result of working in this way and we apologize for any inconvenience caused," said the NUH.
“Patient safety is always our top priority, and we would like to thank colleagues for their continued efforts and swift response to help rectify the problem. We can confirm that no elective surgeries were canceled or delayed as a result of this outage.”
IT outages in hospitals are not a rarity and are caused by various issues. In the UK in 2022, London-based Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust suffered a significant outage during the heatwave leaving doctors unable to access patient medical records, and ultimately costing the NHS around £1.4m ($1.7m).
This year so far has seen IT outages impacting hospitals in New Zealand and Western Australia, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City suffered a four-hour IT outage after a cat jumped on a keyboard, deleting a server cluster.
