NHS 111 outage was cyber attack, service host confirms

The total system outage suffered by NHS 111 last Thursday was a cyber attack, the 111 service host Advanced has confirmed. 

First revealed by Pulse, the 111 outage meant GPs in London were warned they could see an influx of patients signposted from the service.

Simon Short, chief operations officer at Advanced, told the BBC: ‘A security issue was identified yesterday, which resulted in loss of service. 

‘We can confirm that the incident is related to a cyber-attack and as a precaution, we immediately isolated all our health and care environments.’ 

He said the issue had been contained ‘to a small number of servers’.

The RCGP thanked GPs who staffed urgent primary care over the weekend while 111 was down.

Simon Short, chief operations officer at Advanced, told Pulse: ‘A security issue was identified which resulted in loss of service on infrastructure hosting products used by our Health & Care customers. 

‘Following discovery of this incident, we immediately isolated all our Health and Care environments and no further issues have been detected. 

‘Early intervention from our Incident Response Team contained this issue to a small number of servers representing an extremely small percentage of our Health & Care infrastructure. The protection of services and data is paramount in the actions we have and are taking.

‘In the meantime those NHS impacted services will continue to operate [using contingency].’