A data center issue brought down operations at three hospitals in the Lörrach district of Germany on October 4.

As reported by SWR, the issue was caused by the overheating of the server systems that supported the District Hospital and St. Elisabethen Hospital in Lörrach, as well as the District Hospital in Schopfheim.

During the night of October 3, the air conditioning system at the hospitals' data center failed, causing the outage. As a result, a large portion of its systems were brought offline, meaning devices such as MRI and X-ray could not be used.

In addition, the emergency room was out of action, and all active emergencies were diverted to other nearby hospitals.

No evidence of a cyberattack causing the outage has been found.

According to the Lörrach District Hospitals, the systems were back up and running by the evening of October 4. It took around five hours for the outage to be resolved.

Hospital spokesperson, Thilo Jakob, said: "The disruption has now been completely resolved. Patient safety was guaranteed at all times.

"All technical systems are running stably again; all tests have been successfully completed. The emergency room and all other areas of the hospital are now fully operational again. This applies to all three hospital locations in the Lörrach district."

Lörrach district is located in the southwest of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in the very southwest of the country.

The hospital group has not shared where its data center is located, though it is shared between the three hospitals despite them not being located in the same location.

According to DataCenterMap, there are two colocation data centers in the region operated by BadenIT and Mediasecure Data Center. DCD reached out to both to see if they were hosting infrastructure for the hospitals; Mediasecure stated that it was not, no response has yet been received from BadenIT.

Outages at hospital data centers can have a massive impact. Most notably, an outage in 2022 in London during the summer heatwave ended up costing the NHS around £1.4 million ($1.7m). Also in the UK, hospitals in Nottingham suffered an IT failure in September 2024.