A cancer patient says surgery to remove a four-centimetre mass from her brain was canceled this week – due to a worldwide IT glitch.
Chantelle Mooney, 41, was due to undergo a craniotomy on Friday July 19 – but says the operation was canceled due to the worldwide IT outage.
Chantelle was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022 – which had spread to her lungs.
She was then told three weeks ago that a mass had also been found in her brain – after she began experiencing weakness on one side.
After initially being pushed back from Thursday, Chantelle arrived at Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire in the UK on Friday morning – expecting to go into surgery at 10am.
But as she was watching TV in the waiting area before being called into the theater, she noticed the news that Microsoft technology was facing outages across the globe.
And she says 10 minutes later her surgeon arrived to explain that they rely on Microsoft technology for scans, emergency medicine, access to medical records and more.
After spending the morning waiting to see if the matter would be resolved, at 1.30pm she was told the operation would not go ahead and would be postponed to the following Friday.
Chantelle, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I have a secondary brain tumor – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.
“The brain tumor was found only three weeks ago, it is four centimeters wide and needs to be removed as an emergency.
“We were watching TV in the living room and we could see the Microsoft thing going on.
“Ten minutes later the surgeon came in and said they can’t do the surgery without Microsoft.
“Many tools and scans use Microsoft and use it for emergency medicine.
“They said they can’t do the surgery until the software is back.
“It is a long operation, it can be from four to seven hours, and [after waiting] at 1:30pm they came back and said there was no way they could do it, if it falls again it’s too dangerous.
“At that time I was upset because it had already been postponed for a day.
“But I didn’t realize how much it would have affected the operation, if it fell again it would put my life in danger.
“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.”
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been contacted for comment.
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