DAY THE SCREENS WENT DEAD
NHS staff tell of shock as computers freeze... then hospitals plunge into chaos
THE screens went blank one by one. Shortly after 1.30pm staff in busy hospital wards, GP surgeries, operating theatres and NHS offices up and down the country sat blinking uncomprehendingly at their screens as their systems went down.
Yesterday stunned doctors, nurses and staff revealed how the NHS was paralysed over a matter of hours from a catastrophic cyber attack.
A spam email set off an irreversible train of events, infecting computers, critical hospital software and finally even the phones went dead.
One shocked worker at Colchester General Hospital described how her office’s computers were ‘wiped out, one by one’. ‘My computer locked at about 3pm and I couldn’t get anything to work. Then my colleague sat next to me said her computer was down. It swept through the office and everyone was affected and didn’t know what was going on. One by one the computers were wiped out.’
Tim Dawson, a doctor in a hospital in the North West, said: ‘NW hospital computer systems under cyber attack 4 ransom... Sitting in front of a blank screen & can’t do any work. Criminal. Poor patients.’ Another medic, Chris Lofthouse said: ‘Someone has hacked into the computer network at Royal Blackburn Hospital!! Can’t give out prescriptions to anyone!!!!’
Nurses and doctors were forced to resort to pen and paper and by 3pm, the only form of communication was handheld radios. One father, Warren Jones, said staff could not even print out an identity tag for his baby daughter born at 10.30am yesterday. The 24-year- old courier said: ‘They don’t want to let peo- ple go [from the hospital]. It is normal to have two baby tags – we have got no tags. They can’t print them out.’
Patients, relatives and friends flocked to social media to vent their fury as patients were told at the last minute their operations were cancelled.
Pharmacist Chris Maguire tweeted: ‘All shut down in Yorkshire – even in GP practice. Back to handwriting notes while seeing patients without full histories!’ Richard Davidson, a junior doctor in Carlisle, tweeted: ‘Clinic in ruins. This is chaos. Why would anyone do this?’
Another doctor posted: ‘Massive NHS hack cyber-attack today. Hospital in shut down. Thanks for delaying emergency patient care & endangering lives. A**holes.’
Twitter user fendifile, a doctor based in London, shared a photo of her computer screen following the cyber attack. She added: ‘We are in middle of an #nhscyberattack computers now all powered off. Happy Friday. Our emergency surgeries are running doors open, we can access our software but ransomware window pops up every 20-30 seconds so we are slow.’
Patient Mark Pritchard wrote: ‘Can’t get discharged from Colchester general and my test results inaccessible – all computers down from what I hear.’
Dr Tarek Seda, who works at Kings Mill Hospital in Mansfield, said he had to divert a serious case because of the cyber attack. He told the BBC: ‘I had a lady today who has severe back pain which potentially could paralyse her, and we had to divert her to another hospital... for further management.’
And an ambulance driver who works for a subcontractor at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital claimed that another ransomware attack had happened six months previously. He said: ‘It’s terrible if this has happened again... the system was down for a few days.’
‘One by one the PCs were wiped out’