The U.K.’s National Health Service is experiencing outages resulting from a cyberattack on a third-party vendor.
The outage stems from a cyberattack on third-party vendor Birmingham-based technology provider Advanced’s Adastra system, which supplies digital services for urgent healthcare services number 111. A company executive acknowledged the attack in an interview with the BBC.
“We can confirm that the incident is related to a cyberattack and as a precaution, we immediately isolated all our health and care environments,” says Simon Short, company chief operating officer.
A spokesperson for the National Health Service told U.K. online magazine PulseToday that the service is working with Adastra to resolve the problem and that “tried and tested contingency plans are in place for local areas who use this service.”
The outage may be particularly acute in Wales, where the ambulance service is telling residents that calls “may take longer than usual to be answered” due to a “major outage of a computer system.”
