The Fiona Stanley Hospital has been hit by a devastating IT outage, disrupting services at the Western Australian facility.

Patients were told that their appointments were delayed indefinitely, while ambulances were diverted to other hospitals.

Critical healthcare equipment was unaffected by the outage. The hospital is slowly recovering (as of 10:48PM UTC), but has yet to share the cause of the outage.

The outage began before Amazon Web Services experienced a massive outage in Northern Virginia, and it is not believed they are related.

Last month, nurses at the Perth hospital said that they were working 24-hour shifts amid a staffing crunch and high numbers of intensive care patients.

IT outages at hospitals can be deadly - in 2020 a ransomware-caused outage at a Düsseldorf hospital led to the death of a patient after operations were postponed.

Earlier this year, a data center outage caused surgeries and procedures to be paused at a number of Wichita hospitals.