A Tuesday morning outage at Ascension Via Christi’s Wichita data center forced the company to pause most surgeries and procedures at hospitals in the Kansas city.

The data center suffered a power outage for reasons unknown, bringing down hospital IT and phone services.

"Our hospitals and clinics remain open and backup procedures are in place to ensure safe patient care while the issue is being resolved," Ascension said in a statement. “We are notifying patients whose procedures have been paused and will provide further updates as information becomes available."

DCD has contacted the company for further details on the cause of the outage, and the healthcare provider's redundancy plans.

Services began to return at 4 pm on Tuesday at hospitals and clinics, but it took another three hours for the full return of Internet and phone services.

Earlier this week, nurses picketed the largest provider of healthcare services in Kansas over concerns about staffing issues and workplace violence.

An outage at two London hospitals during the 2022 UK heatwave cost £1.4 million ($1.7m), and delayed procedures.

Two years earlier, a ransomware-caused outage at a Düsseldorf hospital led to the death of a patient after operations were postponed.