Health New Zealand has confirmed the cause of an outage at northern hospitals that lasted more than 12 hours on Wednesday.
"Health New Zealand hospitals in Te Tai Tokerau, Waitematā, Auckland and Counties Manukau experienced an IT outage yesterday impacting some clinical and operational systems," said Health NZ executive director northern region Andrew Brant.
"The outage lasted around 12 hours with services restored to all impacted hospitals in the early hours of [Thursday] morning."
Brant said the affected hospitals and emergency departments "remained open and patient care continued safely during the incident".
The Public Service Association said the outage took down "all ED, laboratory and inpatient systems", and meant doctors and nurses were forced to resort to paper and pen, and clinicians were unable to access key patient information across the region.
Today, Health New Zealand confirmed the northern region outage was due to an issue with "part of our network infrastructure in one of our data centres".
The facility was described as a "commercial data centre that we host a number of our systems in".
The agency said local and national teams responded, alongside global vendors, to bring the service back up.
"We’re confident the failure won’t reoccur," a Health New Zealand spokesperson said.
"We’ve got monitoring on the hardware component that failed, and we’re doing a review of the outage as well."
Yesterday, Health New Zealand's acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said there was "no link between IT outages in recent weeks and staffing numbers in the Digital Services team at Health New Zealand".
"All but one of the outages this month have been due to third party vendor issues," Douglas said at the time.
"We do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the recent IT outages where thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely."
The outage followed a major data breach incident after the privately-operated patient portal Manage My Health was hit by cyber attackers late last year.
The app, used by some general practices around New Zealand, confirmed it had identified a cyber security incident involving "unauthorised access" to the "My Health Documents" module, impacting around 6-7% of the approximately 1.8 million registered users were impacted.
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