UHN’s health information system down for hours

The health information system at University Health Network (UHN) has been restored after an early morning outage led to a Code Grey being called across the network’s sites.

The health system outage, which occurred at about 5 a.m. Wednesday, prompted the large public research and teaching hospital network to alert patients to expect appointment or service delays. The affected sites included Toronto General Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto Western Hospital and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.

By mid-morning, UHN said its IT team had “quickly ruled out a cyber event” and had begun “the complex process of restoring and testing systems.”

A UHN spokesperson confirmed that by about 12:45 p.m. the network had restored its health information system and that “all other systems are coming back online,” including its patient portal and website.

“Patients may experience appointment delays for the remainder of the day as backlogs are cleared,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that UHN thanks “patients, visitors and the wider public for their understanding and co-operation.”

Earlier on Wednesday, UHN confirmed to the Star that some surgeries and other treatments were cancelled “out of an abundance of caution” and that patients with early morning appointments “may have experienced delays or in isolated cases, postponement of procedures.”

The spokesperson said clinics will contact patients directly to rebook any postponed appointments.

The University Health Network said its IT team ‘ruled out a cyber event’ as the cause of the outage