Global Microsoft outage hits NHS GP IT system

The Microsoft outage has led to significant disruption to NHS services, particularly GP practices around the country.

The outage has affected the Emis Web GP IT system, meaning NHS GP practices across the UK are unable to access patient notes, appointment bookings and prescription management.

The Emis system is by far the most popular system among UK GPs, being used by 58% of GP practices in the country. Many practices are having to turn away patients, and patients are unable to get through to their GP.

City Health Centre in Manchester issued a statement to its patients, apologising for the disruption. “Unfortunately, there is a national issue with Emis Web – the clinical computer system used within GP practices. This will affect our ability to book appointments/consult with patients,” the GP practice said.

An NHS England spokesperson said that the outage was causing an issue with Emis “which is causing disruption in the majority of GP practices”, adding: “The NHS has longstanding 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.”

Some secondary care services also experienced issues following the outage, including The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust, where it affected internal staffing roster systems as well as text reminders for patient appointments.

Pharmacies are also reporting issues with accessing prescriptions from GPs.

The IT issues were caused by a security update by security firm CrowdStrike’s Falcon service to Microsoft software, which caused an outage in a number of Microsoft products worldwide.  

Microsoft 365 was also offline from 10pm last night due to what the company said was “a configuration change”. The service was restored, but at 9am today, several Microsoft products were still affected. There are also numerous reports across the internet that Microsoft users worldwide, including governments, banks, supermarkets and airlines, have experienced outages. 

Microsoft identified the root cause of the outage as configuration changes made to a portion of its Azure backend workloads, which caused interruption between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

A CrowdStrike spokesperson said the fault was caused by a “single content update for Windows hosts”, and that Mac and Linux hosts were not affected.

“This is not a security incident or a cyber attack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” the spokesperson said.

Tom Simnett, founder and director of Manchester based tech company Initforthe, said it is an “unfortunate consequence of everyone relying on cloud based platforms that everyone uses is that when they go down, everyone is affected and it becomes hugely disruptive”.

“In the time since I saw [the news of the fault] this morning, I’ve had a message from my GP saying they can’t do anything. I can’t check my flights on Ryanair and countless other businesses are hugely affected,” he said.

“A reliance on single providers for everything [businesses that rely for instance on using the whole of Office 365 to run their business – Sharepoint, Outlook etc] creates a single point of failure and whilst that in itself isn’t necessarily an issue, the risk is that such a big reliance on something that isn’t in your own control puts businesses in a high-risk environment unnecessarily.”