Several critical services, including NHS 111 are impacted by an ongoing outage – caused due to a cyberattack on the Advanced, an MSP serving NHS, and others.
People calling NHS 111 are advised to use the service’s website instead and seek help as needed. While confirming this as a cyberattack, the Advanced COO said they deployed the Incident Response Team to contain the issue.
NHS 111 Outage
National Health Services is one of the critical departments of the UK, that serves Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland people. The organization was subject to a number of cyberattacks during the COVID period and during its drug development.
Now, it faces a significant outage caused due to disruption of its managed service provider (MSP) Advanced. Earlier today, the Welsh Ambulance Services noted that Advanced’s Adastra client patient management solution was hit by a major outage – which is used by 85% of NHS 111 services.
Plans are in place due to a system outage impacting 111 and GP out-of-hour services across Wales.
The public can still call 111 but your call may take longer than usual to be answered.
If it's not urgent, head to https://t.co/XHQb6Pfx7f
Read more here: https://t.co/ZPyRp8vojg pic.twitter.com/RNEFraNr9V
— NHS 111 Wales (@NHS111Wales) August 5, 2022
This eventually led to the downtime of NHS 111, which is used widely by UK people. While it’s down, NHS asked people to seek help through its online website. Talking about this incident, Advanced’s Chief Operating Officer Simon Short said they were hit by a “cyberattack” on Thursday morning.
Soon, they “isolated all our (Advanced) health and care environments”, and an “Early intervention from our Incident Response Team contained this issue to a small number of servers representing 2% of our Health & Care infrastructure.”
While they didn’t confirm what type of cyberattack this was, by the words of the Advanced COO, it seems like ransomware. So with Advanced being the MSP of more than 22,000 customers globally, including the NHS, the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and the London City Airport, we may see more companies having their services disrupted.
