My cancer surgery was axed due to CrowdStrike IT chaos – now I have to wait a whole week to remove lethal brain tumour
A CANCER patient has been told she has to wait for surgery to remove a lethal brain tumour because of the global IT meltdown.
Chantelle Mooney, 41, was booked in for major brain surgery last Friday – but says it was cancelled due to the CrowdStrike chaos.
CrowdStrike, a cyber security firm used by Microsoft, sent out a faulty virus-defending update that caused Windows computers to crash en masse, affecting office jobs, flights, supermarkets and – more worryingly – hospitals.
Chantelle arrived at Royal Preston Hospital, Lancashire, on Friday morning expecting to go into surgery at 10am.
But while she was watching TV in the waiting room before being called into theatre, she spotted the news that Microsoft technology was facing outages across the globe.
And she says 10 minutes later her surgeon arrived to explain they relied on Microsoft tech for scans, emergency medication, accessing medical records and more.
By 1.30pm, she was told the surgery would not be going ahead and was going to be pushed back to next Friday.
Chantelle was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which is medical speak for cancer that has spread to two or more organs.
In Chantelle’s case it had spread to her lungs, and she was told three weeks ago she was told doctors discovered a 4cm mass in her brain.
It came after she began to notice weakness down one side.
Chantelle, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I’ve got a secondary brain tumour – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.
“The brain tumour was only found three weeks ago, it’s four centimetres across and has to be removed as an emergency.
“We were watching TV in the waiting room and could see the Microsoft issue going on.
“Ten mins later the surgeon came in and said they can’t do the surgery without Microsoft.”
Chantelle said her procedure was expected to take four to seven hours, so doctors were unwilling to take the risk with faulty software.
“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 end of the day my safety comes first.”
Royal Preston is run by Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who have been approached for comment.
NHS warns GP chaos will continue next week
By Jon Rogers and Jonathan Rose.
THE NHS has warned disruption to GP services will continue into next week, amid warnings of travel delays after flight cancellations.
A flawed update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike knocked many offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling 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 in “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 surgeries reported being unable to book appointments or access patient records as their EMIS Web system went down.
NHS England reported its systems were “coming back online in most areas” on Saturday afternoon but were “still running slightly slower than usual”.