CrowdStrike outage: NHS warns of GP disruption next week

Among the platforms affected by the outage is EMIS, which many GPs use to manage appointment bookings and patient records – including sending prescriptions to pharmacies.

This meant GPs could not access medical records or give patients the results of recent tests, while any prescriptions had to be filled out on paper. Many surgeries reverted to offering only emergency appointments.

Asif Akram, who manages the White Rose Medical Practice in Barnsley, told the BBC that as of 09:00 BST on Saturday he was still unable to log in to EMIS.

“We are hoping it will be up and running before Monday, otherwise the situation will get much worse,” he said.

“If systems aren’t working by Monday, we will have further appointment cancellations and a huge amount of catching up to do when systems return.”

The NHS England spokesman said: “The majority of systems, including the EMIS appointment and patient record system, are now coming back online in most areas, however they are still running slightly slower than usual.”

In a statement, Nick Kaye, chairman of the National Pharmacy Association, said that community pharmacies’ digital systems were “by and large back online” – but that disruption was expected to continue as the outage had caused backlogs in processing prescriptions.

Earlier, his deputy Olivier Picard said pharmacies were facing “continuous problems”, having not been able to receive digital prescription issued after the outage occurred.