A cancer patient was told she would have to wait for surgery to remove a lethal brain tumor because of the global IT meltdown.
Chantelle Mooney, 41, was scheduled for major brain surgery last Friday – but says it was canceled due to the CrowdStrike chaos.
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CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company used by Microsoft, sent a faulty virus defense update that caused Windows computers to crash en masse, affecting office jobs, flights, supermarkets and – most worryingly – hospitals.
Chantelle arrived at the Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire on Friday morning, expecting to have surgery at 10am.
But while watching TV in the waiting room before being called into the theater, she caught the news that Microsoft’s technology was facing outages around the world.
And she says 10 minutes later her surgeon arrived to explain that they depended on Microsoft technology for exams, emergency medications, access to medical records and more.
At around 1:30 pm, she was informed that the surgery would not take place and would be postponed until next Friday.
Chantelle was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which is a medical term for cancer that has spread to two or more organs.
In Chantelle’s case, the disease had spread to her lungs, and she was told three weeks ago that doctors discovered a 4cm mass in her brain.
This happened after she started noticing weakness on one side.
Chantelle, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I have a secondary brain tumor – my main diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.
“The brain tumor was only found three weeks ago, is four centimeters in diameter and needs to be removed urgently.
“We were watching TV in the waiting room and we could see the Microsoft issue happening.
“Ten minutes later, the surgeon arrived and said he couldn’t do the surgery without Microsoft.”
Chantelle said her procedure was expected to take four to seven hours, so doctors weren’t willing to take the risk with faulty software.
“At the time I was upset because it had already been postponed for a day.
“But I didn’t realize how much it would have affected the operation, if I fell again it would put my life at risk.
“They wouldn’t have been able to do brain scans, blood transfusions – they wouldn’t even have been able to access my medical records.
“They really didn’t want to cancel the surgery because of the seriousness of the situation, but at the end of the day my safety comes first.”
Royal Preston is run by Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which has been contacted for comment.
NHS warns GP chaos will continue next week
By Jon Rogers and Jonathan Rose.
The NHS has warned that disruption to GP services will continue into next week amid warnings of travel delays following flight cancellations.
A flawed update released by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many offline across the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and paralyzing some healthcare systems.
A fix was deployed for a bug in the update, which affected Microsoft Windows PCs, on Friday, as CrowdStrike’s chief executive said it would take “some time” for systems to be fully restored.
The outage caused disruption to “the majority of GP practices” on Friday, NHS England said, and ambulance services also reported increased pressure on 999 and NHS 111 services.
Across England, GP practices reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records when the EMIS Web system went down.
NHS England said its systems were “coming back online in most areas” on Saturday afternoon, but were “still running slightly slower than normal”.
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
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