A global IT outage is affecting the ‘majority’ of GP practices in England, with the EMIS system and Microsoft applications affected.
It has caused problems across flights, train services and banks as well as GP practices.
It is also affecting pharmacies attempting to pull up electronic prescriptions.
NHS England has acknowledged ‘an issue with EMIS’ as a result of the global IT outage, which is ‘causing disruption in the majority of GP practices’.
The cause of the outage was a ‘defect’ at CrowdStrike, a global cyber-security firm which has confirmed that there was no ‘security incident or cyberattack’.
NHS Greater Manchester has said that there is a ‘national issue with EMIS’ which will ‘affect GP practices’ ability to book and consult with patients’, in a post on X this morning.
Various GP practices have updated their patients on the outage, with the Sunlight Group Practice in Birkenhead saying ‘engineers are currently working to resolve’ the issue.
Brownlow Health Central in Liverpool told patients that prebooked appointments will ‘be running as normal’ but that they can only deal with ‘clinically urgent matters’ at the moment.
Practices in Kent were told not to refer patients to other services as ‘all of these are under additional pressure’ too.
In an alert sent to practices this morning, Kent and Medway ICB said: ‘The issue is being investigated and we will keep you updated as more details develop. Please use your business continuity plans if you are affected.’
The ICB also said it has ‘urgently’ arranged for eConsult ‘to be switched off’ for all practices.
Doncaster GP partner Dr Dean Eggitt told Pulse that EMIS Web has been affected by the IT outage but TPP’s SystmOne – the other main GP IT system provider – is functioning as normal.
TPP confirmed this, stating that all services are ‘fully operational’ and ‘not affected by today’s IT outage’.
Problems with prescriptions in community pharmacy have come to the attention of the National Pharmacy Association (NPA), who are raising this ‘urgently’ with NHS England.
A spokesperson for the NPA said: ‘We’re aware that due to global IT outages that services in some community pharmacies, including the accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries, are disrupted today. We urge patients to be patient whilst visiting their pharmacy.’
According to Community Pharmacy England, pharmacies may also have to make emergency medicine supplies under the Pharmacy First scheme, if patients are being referred to them as a result of not being able to access their GP.
Responding to the outage, a spokesperson for NHSE said: ‘The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP.
‘There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would.
‘Patients should attend appointments unless told otherwise. Only contact your GP if it’s urgent, and otherwise please use 111 online or call 111.’
Surrey GP partner Dr Dave Triska told Pulse that EMIS being down has forced his practice to turn off Accurx as it is ‘not safe to have on’.
He also said there had been no communication to his GP practice from any organisation aside from Accurx.
To help GPs ‘facing the nightmare of today’, Dr Triska has shared a folder which includes a generic business continuity plan and a proforma for hand-written notes.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that it is ‘actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts’.
He continued: ‘This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.’
In an statement on X, EMIS confirmed it has been affected by the global outage, and directed GPs to check the service status page on EMIS Now for updates.
The company said: ‘We’re affected by a third-party issue that is impacting organisations globally, and we’re working with the relevant parties to restore service as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this is causing.’
Given my experience yesterday, I strongly suspect it is not an EMIS issue as such.
I was in a meeting, with Teams, when Teams threw me out; insisted my browser did not support the web-version of Teams even whilst I was back in the meeting through the browser version; then refused to download the Teams app fresh from the Microsoft website – the download button was just doing nothing; then, having re-booted my computer 3 times during the break/meeting to try to fix it, it reinstalled and opened itself whilst I was watching on the browser edition (which was ‘not supported’ so not possible?), and interfered so that none of the buttons worked and the screen pictures did not coincide with the video frames.
No way is this a problem on my computer, this is clearly a MS and Team issue. Unfortunaetly EMIS relies on a considerable amount of MS software. would be better for UK if it did not – as we are at the mercy of MS for access to our patient information! Could be worse with Palantir now being given the go-ahead to hold us to ransom also. It is like a mandated mlware infection that you cannot avoid by being ‘careful’.
Well done to our (and all) Reception teams nationally having to deal with this nightmare situation. Back to pen and paper and collection of handwritten scripts. And it a hot morning, but we’re all coping admirably and for the most part patients are understanding.
For once Emis is not entirely to blame here because it turns out it’s a cyber security firm working for Microsoft.
But EMIS always seems slow to react. Their servers need to have the faulty patch deleted in safe mode then rebooted to reinstall the fixed patch. They should be pulling people in to do this ASAP instead of working in slow motion like they always do.
Seriously what planet is the NHSE spokesman on?