A failed air conditioning system at UNC Health's remote data center brought down computer operations at its hospitals and clinics in North Carolina.
First reported by The News & Observer, the outage shortly follows the massive IT disruptions that were caused by a CrowdStrike software update, which also impacted UNC Health.
According to UNC Health spokesperson Alan Wolf, nurses and doctors were still able to continue treating patients but did not have access to medical records for around an hour and a half. Instead, staff used paper forms until the servers were operational again at 4:30 pm local time.
“Our IT experts were able to restore most systems again quickly,” said Wolf, “And our clinical providers were able to continue providing patient care.”
UNC Health was also one of the organizations impacted by the recent CrowdStrike and Microsoft global failure, which affected airlines, banks, and hospitals.
UNC experienced "scattered computer outages" as a result of that failure, but patient services were unimpacted.
In February 2024, UNC experienced a network outage at 15 of its hospitals after unforeseen issues arose as a result of routine maintenance. During that time, other local hospitals stepped up to receive ambulances that UNC Health was unable to.
The issues lasted around three hours. At the time, UNC said: "Our hospital staff's response to this situation was phenomenal. They came together and continued to provide high-level care to all of our patients. We applaud our nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and other providers who work tirelessly to provide excellent patient care at all times." The hospitals were still accepting walk-ins during this time.
Earlier this year two hospitals in Sussex, the UK, suffered outages caused by a power failure at their IT room which temporarily shut down all IT systems.
Nottingham University Hospital experienced a similar outage in October 2023. Last year also saw IT outages impact 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.
In 2022, London-based Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust suffered a significant outage during a summer heatwave leaving doctors unable to access patient medical records, ultimately costing the NHS around £1.4m ($1.7m).
