{"id":527992,"date":"2025-10-25T23:49:41","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T23:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/527992\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T23:49:41","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T23:49:41","slug":"aws-outage-causes-disruption-to-patient-care-across-nhs-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/527992\/","title":{"rendered":"AWS outage causes disruption to patient care across NHS sites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exclusive: An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which affected more than 1,000 companies and millions of internet users, is believed to have disrupted patient care across several NHS sites.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A digital chief at an acute trust told Digital Health News that at least 10 NHS sites using Oracle<\/a> systems, were \u201cin downtime scenarios\u201d on the morning of 20 October 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cOracle, since buying Cerner, hosts some of its services on AWS and some on their own infrastructure. They\u2019re in the process of moving more to Oracle\u2019s own cloud, but that hasn\u2019t fully happened yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s worth knowing that if NHS services are dependent on cloud providers and they go down, then it\u2019s probably more important than losing Snapchat,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

The source added that trusts were forced to revert to paper records and business continuity processes, which is likely to have affected patient care.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen systems go down, especially unexpectedly, it\u2019s disruptive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you know it\u2019ll be an hour, you can plan around it, but if you don\u2019t know how long it\u2019ll last, then gold\/silver command gets triggered.<\/p>\n

\u201cDecisions need to be made about reverting to continuity procedures and later you\u2019ve got to re-enter data which is very time-consuming,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

They added that the outage \u201cmay not have been entirely Oracle-related\u201d and there may have been disruption to NHSE\u2019s Lightweight Directory Access Protocol service, the authentication and identity system used by the Spine Directory Service.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for NHSE told Digital Health News that the issue was not impacting on national NHS services.<\/p>\n

NHS sites believed to be affected by the outage include Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Barts Health NHS Trust, Royal Free London, West Hertfordshire Teaching Colleges NHS Trust, Whipps Cross Hospital, County Hospital, Ashford and St. Peter\u2019s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust, and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust confirmed that the trust had been affected by the outage and temporarily \u201clost power to desktops\u201d.<\/p>\n

British technology firm System C<\/a>, which supports more than 700,000 users across 400 customers in the NHS, private healthcare and social care, confirmed that the AWS outage had impacted some of its services and it had invoked service business continuity procedures.<\/p>\n

In an email, seen by Digital Health News, System C said: \u201cThe AWS outage has been widely reported across news channels this morning, and we are alerting you that the vendor of Jira, Atlassian, has also been affected.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that Jira, our Customer Portal and Knowledge Hub, is currently unavailable. Atlassian has published an incident, which is being investigated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon confirmed<\/a> that all AWS services were restored to normal operations by 15.01pm PDT (22.01 GMT) on 20 October but \u201csome services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect\u201d continued to have a backlog of messages.<\/p>\n

It added that the outage was caused by \u201cDNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints\u201d.<\/p>\n

Digital Health News contacted Oracle and all the trusts named for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exclusive: An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which affected more than 1,000 companies and millions of internet users,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4316],"tags":[25943,4121,171102,105,4348,171103,171104,171105,171106,171107,171108,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-527992","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-amazon-web-services","9":"tag-aws","10":"tag-central-and-north-west-london-nhs-foundation-trust","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-it-disruption","14":"tag-jira","15":"tag-major-outage","16":"tag-oracle-cerner","17":"tag-oracle-health","18":"tag-system-c","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115437487180801152","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}