A cancer patient said surgery to remove a mass from her brain was cancelled this week due to the worldwide IT outage
Chantelle Mooney, 41, was due to have a craniotomy on Friday but said the surgery was cancelled following the global IT glitch.
Ms Mooney was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which spread to her lungs.
She was then told three weeks ago that a four centimetre mass had also been found in her brain – after she started experiencing weakness down one side.
After initially being pushed back on Thursday, Ms Mooney arrived at Royal Preston Hospital, Lancashire, on Friday morning, expecting to go into surgery at 10am.
But while she was watching TV in the waiting area before being called into theatre, she spotted the news that Microsoft technology was facing outages across the world.
The technical fault – caused by an update pushed out to customers of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike – caused Windows software to suddenly shut down.
Have YOU been affected by the outage? Email katherine.lawton@mailonline.co.uk
Chantelle Mooney, 41, (pictured) was due to have a craniotomy on Friday but said the surgery was cancelled following the global IT glitch
Ms Mooney was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which spread to her lungs
Ms Mooney said later her surgeon arrived to explain they relied on Microsoft technology for scans, emergency medication, accessing medical records and more.
After spending the morning waiting to see if the issue would be solved, Ms Mooney was told at 1.30pm that the surgery would not be going ahead and was going to be pushed back to next Friday.
Ms Mooney, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: ‘I’ve got a secondary brain tumour – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.
‘The brain tumour was only found three weeks ago, it’s four centimetres across and has to be removed as an emergency.
‘We were watching TV in the waiting room and could see the Microsoft issue going on.
‘Ten mins later the surgeon came in and said they can’t do the surgery without Microsoft.
‘A lot of the tools and scans use Microsoft and they use it for emergency medication.
‘They said they can’t do the surgery until the software comes back up.
After spending the morning waiting to see if the issue would be solved, Ms Mooney was told the surgery would not be going ahead that day
Huge queues of holidaymakers at London Gatwick Airport following the global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike software
Passengers at Stansted Airport left in chaos and without flight information following the worldwide IT failure
Millions of users and businesses worldwide were faced with the ‘blue screen of death’ on Friday as systems were crippled by the outage
Railway services still faced disruption in the UK on Saturday. Pictured: A South Western Railway ticket machine put out of action due to the outage
‘It’s a long surgery, it can be anything from four to seven hours, and [after waiting] at 1.30pm they came back and said there was no way they were going to do it, if it goes down again it’s too risky.
‘At the time I was upset because it had already been pushed back by a day.
‘But I didn’t realise how much it would have affected the operation, if it went down again it would put my life at risk.’
She added: ‘They wouldn’t have been able to do brain scans, blood transfusions – they couldn’t even access my medical records.
‘They really didn’t want to cancel the surgery because of how serious it is but end of the day my safety comes first.’
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been approached for comment.
The massive Microsoft outage has sparked chaos around the world – grounding flights and knocking hospitals, GP surgeries, train services, banks, stock exchanges and TV channels offline.
The technical fault – caused by an update pushed out to customers of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike – has caused Windows software to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh.
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.
Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
British train passengers were warned to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’, while NHS England said patients should attend GP appointments unless told otherwise due to problems with the appointment and patient record system.
