Athenahealth, Allscripts websites affected by outage

The websites of EHR software providers Athenahealth and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions were down for some parts of the country Friday after hackers launched an attack against the servers of Dyn, a major Domain Name System host.

Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and Shopify were down most of last Friday morning and afternoon, but healthcare companies seemed to be largely unaffected.

Dyn posted on its website Friday that it experienced an attack early that morning but restored services a few hours later. A second attack occurred around 11 a.m. Central time. At deadline, Dyn was still investigating and mitigating the attacks, it said.

A spokeswoman for web-based electronic health record provider Athenahealth said that while its customer-facing retail site was down, none of its EHR software clients had reported problems.

Spokeswoman Victoria Gavaza added that the issue was not related to Athenahealth servers or backup servers. Athenahealth also said its data is “maintained intact and secure” and “backed up constantly” when there’s an issue with the internet.

Robert Tennant, director of health information technology at the Medical Group Management Association, said the organization hadn’t heard of any members dealing with issues related to the internet outage.

But he called Friday’s cyberattack against Dyn a reminder to healthcare organizations that they need to prepare for instances when medical data isn’t available.