Cancer patients have been forced to skip treatments and diabetics have been left without lifesaving drugs due to an ongoing global Microsoft IT outage.
GP services up and down the county have also been affected with family doctors struggling to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals.
MailOnline has also learnt that chemotherapy service in some parts of the NHS have also been hit.
One patient, undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer at The Christie Hospital in Manchester and who spoke on a condition of anonymity, said multiple cancer sufferers has been unable to complete their weekly appointments.
They told this website: ‘Due to the global IT outage nobody here is able to have chemotherapy treatment, as all records of patients dosage and chemotherapy types is only held on the computer system, with no paper copies.’
Father Grant Ciccone, from Deptford in South East London, is one patient affected by the IT outage telling MailOnline he is unable to get more of the insulin he needs to keep his diabetes stable
The global Microsoft outage has hit vital NHS services, according to reports that medical computer system EMIS is not working
One patient, undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer at The Christie Hospital in Manchester and who spoke on a condition of anonymity, said multiple cancer sufferers has been unable to complete their weekly appointments
‘There is a very full waiting room of people waiting in the hope the system is mended but I have decided to not wait. Meaning I miss my chemotherapy dose for this week.
‘I think it’s ridiculous there is not a back up paper copy of patients treatment.’
A Christie NHS Foundation Trust spokesperson confirmed they ahd been hit by the global IT issue.
‘This IT outage is expected to have an impact on chemotherapy and immunotherapy services and some internal hospital systems,’ they said.
‘Patients who have an appointment should attend as usual unless they have been contacted in advance by our team, this includes patients attending for Systemic Anti-Cancer Treatments who should attend as normal unless they have been contacted.
‘Some chemotherapy and immunotherapy appointments have already been rearranged and we are working with our suppliers and partners to resolve the issue and have plans in place to mitigate the disruption.
Another patient, this time with diabetes, said they had been unable to get the medication they needed to live.
Father Grant Ciccone, from Deptford in South East London, told MailOnline he has run out of the insulin injections needed to keep his type 1 diabetes under control and due to the IT outage cannot get anymore.
‘I cannot order insulin which I need to keep me alive. I have run out of two types of insulin which I need,’ he said.
‘Don’t know when I will be able to get a prescription as the GP website is down as well and no one is answering the phone.’
Diabetics unable to access the insulin they need can suffer from a life-threatening condition diabetic ketoacidosis.
This is where the lack of insulin, which people without diabetes produce naturally, leads to a harmful build-up of a chemical called ketones in the blood.
Ketones are generated when the body burns fat and, while having some in the body is normal, if levels get too high they can make the blood slightly acidic and damage organs.
GTD Healthcare, a major UK healthcare provider in the North West of England which uses the system, said its services had been impacted by the outage
Another primary care provider Solihull Healthcare Partnership, said its ability to book appointments would be affected by the EMIS outage
Multiple GPs services have also been hit by outage with a system called EMIS, which is used by primary care providers to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals hit by the outage.
One GP practice manager in Berkshire told this website: ‘We are completely dead in the water.
‘We can’t see any patients our systems are down. It’s not clinically safe to treat patients because we can’t see their notes.’
Dr Darren Simpson, a GP in Wallsend, Newcastle added: ‘We’re a bit stuck. EMIS is the entire GP record — all letters, hospital results, everything we document and patient bookings are done through it.
‘When we log on, it just says “Network Error”.
‘If a patient calls with an acute problem of course we can still see them and we issue handwritten prescriptions.
‘We just can’t see their full medical records, look at results or check what medication they’re on.’
MailOnline has contacted EMIS for comment.
But an alert issued by the company to GPs this morning, seen by this website, said: ‘We are aware that users are still unable to access EMIS Web’.
‘We are affected by a third-party issue that is impacting organisations globally, and we are working with the relevant parties to restore service as soon as possible.
‘Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this is causing. We will continue to keep you updated as this work progresses.’
An NHS England spokesperson confirmed the problem, stating: ‘The NHS is aware of a global IT outage and an issue with EMIS, an appointment and patient record system, which is causing disruption in the majority of GP practices.’
‘The NHS has long standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP.
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‘There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would.’
They added that patients should continue to attend appointments unless told otherwise.
MailOnline also contacted NHS England about impacts to chemotherapy services.
The IT fault, which started last night, caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to suddenly turn off at airports, grounding flights and knocking TV channels, airports and banks offline.
In the UK, Britain’s biggest train operator told passengers to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues’, while airline Ryanair warned of ‘potential disruption’.
US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error, as they report on their website they are ‘working on it’.
Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologising for the ‘disruption’ to the service at 6am when broadcasting was meant to begin.
It read: ‘We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.’
Ryanair has also seemingly been hit with the issue after it posted on its website urging passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a ‘third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network’.
The issue is impacting companies globally with online reports that Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, the US and the UK have all been affected.
Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high-profile clients.
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.
Windows is the most used operating system in the world, meaning the outage is affecting almost every part of the global economy – with supermarkets and cafes, including Morrisons, Waitrose and the bakery chain Gail’s, unable to take card payments.
In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a whiteboard to record departures.
