Unique: An Amazon Internet Providers (AWS) outage, which affected greater than 1,000 firms and tens of millions of web customers, is believed to have disrupted affected person care throughout a number of NHS websites.
A digital chief at an acute belief informed Digital Well being Information that not less than 10 NHS websites utilizing Oracle programs, have been “in downtime situations” on the morning of 20 October 2025.
“Oracle, since shopping for Cerner, hosts a few of its providers on AWS and a few on their very own infrastructure. They’re within the means of transferring extra to Oracle’s personal cloud, however that hasn’t totally occurred but.
“I believe it’s value figuring out that if NHS providers are depending on cloud suppliers they usually go down, then it’s most likely extra vital than shedding Snapchat,” they stated.
The supply added that trusts have been compelled to revert to paper data and enterprise continuity processes, which is prone to have affected affected person care.
“When programs go down, particularly unexpectedly, it’s disruptive.
“If it’ll be an hour, you may plan round it, however in the event you don’t understand how lengthy it’ll final, then gold/silver command will get triggered.
“Selections must be made about reverting to continuity procedures and later you’ve obtained to re-enter information which could be very time-consuming,” they stated.
They added that the outage “could not have been solely Oracle-related” and there could have been disruption to NHSE’s Light-weight Listing Entry Protocol service, the authentication and identification system utilized by the Backbone Listing Service.
A spokesperson for NHSE informed Digital Well being Information that the problem was not impacting on nationwide NHS providers.
NHS websites believed to be affected by the outage embody Central and North West London NHS Basis Belief, Barts Well being NHS Belief, Royal Free London, West Hertfordshire Educating Faculties NHS Belief, Whipps Cross Hospital, County Hospital, Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Basis Belief, Kingston and Richmond NHS Basis Belief, and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Belief.
A spokesperson for Central and North West London NHS Basis Belief confirmed that the belief had been affected by the outage and quickly “misplaced energy to desktops”.
British expertise agency System C, which helps greater than 700,000 customers throughout 400 prospects within the NHS, non-public healthcare and social care, confirmed that the AWS outage had impacted a few of its providers and it had invoked service enterprise continuity procedures.
In an e mail, seen by Digital Well being Information, System C stated: “The AWS outage has been extensively reported throughout information channels this morning, and we’re alerting you that the seller of Jira, Atlassian, has additionally been affected.
“Which means that Jira, our Buyer Portal and Data Hub, is at the moment unavailable. Atlassian has revealed an incident, which is being investigated.”
Amazon confirmed that every one AWS providers have been restored to regular operations by 15.01pm PDT (22.01 GMT) on 20 October however “some providers comparable to AWS Config, Redshift, and Join” continued to have a backlog of messages.
It added that the outage was attributable to “DNS decision points for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints”.
Digital Well being Information contacted Oracle and all of the trusts named for remark.
