Royal Surrey Hospital declares critical incident over global IT outage
Businesses and institutions around the world have been been knocked offline after a major IT outage
The Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford has declared a critical incident due to a global IT outage.
Businesses and institutions around the world have been been knocked offline and it's believed to have been caused by a faulty update to widely used cybersecurity software.
The outage is "causing disruption in the majority of GP practices" in England but there is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, NHS England said.
The health service said patients should attend appointments unless told otherwise and should only contact their GP if it was urgent.
Statement from the Royal Surrey Hospital:
"Royal Surrey has declared a Critical Incident due to external IT issues which are widely affecting services including ours.
"This issue has affected Varian, the IT system we use to deliver radiotherapy treatments. This means we are currently unable to deliver our scheduled radiotherapy treatments.
"We have contacted our patients who were due to have radiotherapy this morning to reschedule appointments while we work to fix these issues.
"We hope these systems will be up and running soon and will directly contact patients who are due to have radiotherapy appointments if we are unable to deliver their treatments. Please attend your appointments unless you have heard otherwise.
"Other impacted services are still able to continue providing patient care.
"We will continue to provide updates as soon as we have them."
In a statement on social media, CrowdStrike said the global IT outage was "not a security incident or cyberattack", adding: "The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed".