Hospitals are among institutions worldwide affected by an overnight malfunction in the Microsoft Cloud system.
“It basically affected every system in our hospital,” reports Timmins and District Hospital chief information officer Guy Guindon. He says no surgeries or other services had to be cancelled, but admissions to the emergency department were done on paper.
“We register patients via paper. We document everything on paper and provide the service that we would normally provide.”
Guindon says a team was in by about 1:15am, restoring its online environment.
“By seven o’clock,” he says, “I would say we were probably at 80% restoration, and I would say probably by nine, 9:30 this morning as a hospital we were fully operational.”
The exception is that system that forced emergency department admissions to be done on paper. It took a couple more hours to get back.
Guindon says his team was prepared, knowing that a next time isn’t a question of “if?”, but “when?”.
