System outage resolved after several Toronto hospitals affected

The University Health Network (UHN) says an “unexpected system outage” that affected several of its Toronto hospitals has now been resolved.

The hospital network issued a post on X at around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday about the outage that had started at around 5 a.m.

UHN said the outage affected Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and Toronto Rehab.

Dr. Kathryn Tinckam, Physician-in-Chief for UHN, told Global News it was not a cyber attack but the network outage impacted communications and caused delays.

“We are able to continue to deliver safe care.” Tinckam said. “Patients will experience delays throughout the day and there’s been a very small number of cases of procedures that had to be postponed or delayed until later in the day out of an abundance of caution.”

UHN said there were delays at blood labs, other diagnostic services and some outpatient clinics. If appointments need to be rescheduled, UHN said the clinics would reach out to patients.

“We have systems that allow us to move to old fashion pen and paper, paper notes, paper orders, paper records. That allows us to continue to deliver care in the same way we would otherwise, just recognizing there are some delays,” Tinckam said.

The outage impacted the UHN website, which is now back up and running. It also impacted patient portal and patient record systems, the hospital network said.

Tinckam said their IT staff found the source of the problem mid-morning and worked to restore systems. By around 1 p.m., UHN said systems were back up and running.

“We’ve restored our health information system and all other systems are coming back online,” UHN said in a post on X.

“You may experience appointment delays for (the) remainder of (the) day as backlogs are cleared.”

At an unrelated press conference, Ontario’s health minister Sylvia Jones said the outage is likely due to weather as a storm moved into Toronto.

“The wind in particular, has made a challenge in terms of an outage that is impacting UHN,” Jones said.

Jones initially said UHN worked with Toronto Hydro on resolving the problem, however, UHN told Global News that was not the case. It is unclear how exactly the storm affected their systems.