A sophisticated cyber attack has reportedly disrupted the services of NHS UK’s telephone based medical service 111 number severely delaying response to medical emergencies. The downtime was caused because of a software glitch on the servers of Advanced, a privately owned software company that supplies technical services to the medical hotline service.
Initially, it was taught to be a misconfiguration error. However, unidentified people familiar with the matter confirmed that the delay in call processing was taking place due to a digital attack.
National Health Service has allotted special teams to supervise the progress of ambulance distribution and has retorted to paper and pen service wherever needed.
Simon Short, the Chief of Technology company Advanced, acknowledged the incident as true and admitted that the security issue that hit the servers on August 4th,2022 led to the consequences.
As a precautionary measure, all family doctors in England have been digitally informed to attend to patients and are also warned that the influx of patients to them could significantly raised due to a technical issue on the servers of NHS 111.
Although the ambulance services were being restored via backups, patients are still witnessing long delays in dispatch of ambulances.
NOTE- Since, UK is supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, their attack might have targeted by a state sponsored hacking group. But as the investigation is still underway, we cannot come to a definite conclusion on this note.
