ALBAWABA – The National Health Service “NHS,” the publicly funded healthcare system in England and the second largest single-payer healthcare system in the world, warned of chaos and disruption caused by the global IT outage that happened on Friday.
England affected by global IT outage
NHS England reported that hospitals and physicians are dealing with the impact caused by the global glitch up to this moment and warned about the upcoming continued impacts next week.
Patients and tourists were affected likewise in England after Microsoft's global system was struck with a technical outage on Friday. The technical glitch caused a global outage that affected major banks, media, airports, airlines, payment systems, and hospitals.
Microsoft reported on Saturday a global technical IT outage caused by CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity technology company. The technical outage affected nearly 8.5 million devices operating under the Windows system and it was caused when CrowdStrike distributed a corrupted software update to its users and customers.
Many individuals are still experiencing flights delays and cancellations, defective train ticket machines, and problems with the appointment and prescription systems used by GPs and hospitals.
England transportation and medical system is affected by the global IT outage (Shutterstock)
Microsoft said that CrowdStrike is currently working on developing applicable solutions that will help Microsoft repair the damages. The company is also working closely with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
Additionally, NHS England said that computer systems were back online and trying to operate but this coming week will witness disruption and chaos.
7,000 flights were canceled globally, 408 of which were in and out of the UK. The outage also affected railways in the country as passengers had troubles buying tickets as ticket machines were not operating.
Physicians, hospitals, and pharmacies also had to deal with the impact caused by the glitch. Patients had their appointments cancelled and many faced issues with receiving their medications as reported by NHS.
