An IT outage on September 10 prevented two hospitals in Nottingham, the UK, from delivering pathology services.

The two National Health Service (NHS) hospitals affected were City Hospital and Queen's Medical Centre, both of which were left unable to conduct blood tests.

First reported by BBC News Nottingham, patients were asked to not attend blood drawing or testing appointments until further notice.

The Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust's website stated: "There will continue to be delays in the service while we work on a solution. This impacts blood tests from within the trust and from GP colleagues. Business continuity plans are in place and we are working to prioritize the most urgent blood tests, including cancer and pre-op services."

In a September 10 post, the NUH described it as a "critical incident as a result of an IT failure in our Pathology service which has affected our ability to process blood test results in a timely fashion."

By September 11, the IT problems had been "stood down," with the NUH noting: "The affected systems are returning to normal and we are now operating in business as usual."

The exact nature of the IT failure was not disclosed by the NUH, but a spokesperson told BBC that the problem had been first noticed on September 9, and that "the issue with the server failure is matching the patient to the blood sample, so we're asking GPs to do a manual process for urgent blood tests so they can be processed."

DCD has contacted NUH for further information about the cause of the IT failure.

Nottingham University Hospital experienced a similar outage in October 2023, this time caused by a power outage that brought down the hospital's IT systems and WiFi trust-wide and impacted the blood transfusion system, significantly slowing treatment and surgery.

Elsewhere in the UK, a Qilin ransomware attack on Synnovis - the pathology services provider for Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts, and primary care services in southeast London - has been causing ongoing problems for 14 weeks, resulting in appointments and procedures being canceled.

According to a September 13 update, the attack has seen a total of 10,129 acute outpatient appointments and 1,702 elective procedures postponed.

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.

In July 2024, a cooling system failure took down the data center used by UNC Health in North Carolina.

In 2023 IT outages impacted 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).