Patient says brain cancer surgery was cancelled due to Microsoft outage

A woman’s emergency cancer surgery has been delayed by a week after this week’s mass IT outage forced doctors to cancel her surgery. 

Chantelle Mooney, 41, was scheduled for craniotomy to remove a four-centimetre tumour from her brain on Friday. 

However, the surgeons were unable to go ahead due to the Crowdstrike outage, which affected more than 8.5 million Windows devices across the globe – hitting airlines, banks and communications networks, among various others.

Chantelle has been battling the disease since February 2022, when she was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer which soon spread to her lungs. 

She was told three weeks ago a mass had also been found in her brain, following from her loss of sensation down one side of her body. 

Her initial appointment on Thursday was pushed back to Friday, and she turned up at Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire for the surgery, scheduled at 10am. 

She remembers seeing the news about the Microsoft outage on the TV while sitting in the lobby waiting to be called into the theatre.

Less than ten minutes later, the surgeon came out to explain some of the hospital’s equipment relied on the same software, and that they would therefore be unable to proceed. 

Her surgery has now been pushed back again to next Friday. 

Chantelle said: ‘The brain tumour was only found three weeks ago, it’s four centimetres across and has to be removed as an emergency.’

Her doctors waited until 1.30pm to see if the tech could be brought back online but ultimately decided they could not risk another outage in the middle of the procedure, which can take between four and seven hours.

Chantelle explained: ‘A lot of the tools and scans use Microsoft and they use it for emergency medication.

‘They said they can’t do the surgery until the software comes back up.’

She added: ‘At the time I was upset because it had already been pushed back by a day.

‘But I didn’t realise how much it would have affected the operation, if it went down again it would put my life at risk.

‘They wouldn’t have been able to do brain scans, blood transfusions – they couldn’t even access my medical records.

‘They really didn’t want to cancel the surgery because of how serious it is, but at the end of the day, my safety comes first.’

Experts have warned some businesses could take weeks to fully recover from the Crowdstrike outage, despite a recovery tool being launched by the tech company.

Yesterday, Microsoft said 8.5 million devices were affected, making it one of the worst cyber incidents in history.

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