NHS email down: Staff frozen out of more than a million accounts in national outage
Health service suffers 'exceptionally unusual' shutdown
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Your support makes all the difference.The NHS has suffered a national outage of its email system, causing staff across the country to be locked out of more than a million accounts.
The outage was caused by a software issue, the health service said, allaying fears of another cyber attack similar to last year's WannaCry virus, which led to the cancellation of 20,000 appointments and operations.
NHS Digital said access to all accounts was restored by 8pm on Saturday, eight hours after the "severity 1" shutdown began at midday – though some staff reported losing access from 11am.
"We apologise to all of those who have been affected and to those still inconvenienced," NHS Digital said in a statement. "We will continue to monitor the service carefully over the next 24 hours."
The Health Service Journal reported that the issue had affected all 1.2 million accounts on the system, which is run by outsourcing firm Accenture.
Some staff told the news outlet the service had been slow for days.
Victoria Cuthill, a lead nurse at St Mark's Hospital in London, tweeted: "So this is why a password request keeps flashing on my phone screen ... eek, hope it gets sorted soon."
NHS chief clinical information officer Simon Eccles said amid the outage: “NHSmail is completely down on all platforms. This is exceptionally unusual. The team and supplier are investigating.”
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