My life-altering brain surgery was canceled after Microsoft outage hit hospital equipment

A cancer patient says surgery to remove a four-centimeter mass from her brain was cancelled this week — due to the worldwide IT glitch .

Chantelle Mooney, 41, was due to have a craniotomy on Friday 19 July — but says the surgery was cancelled due to the worldwide IT outage .

Chantelle was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022 — which spread to her lungs.

She was then told three weeks ago a mass had also been found in her brain – after she started experiencing weakness down one side.

After initially being pushed back from Thursday, Chantelle arrived at the Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire in the UK on Friday morning — expecting to go into surgery at 10 a.m.

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But while she was watching TV in the waiting area 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 technology for scans, emergency medication, accessing medical records and more.

After spending the morning waiting to see if the issue would be solved, at 1:30 p.m. she was told the surgery would not be going ahead and was going to be pushed back to next Friday.

Chantelle, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I’ve got a secondary brain tumor – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.

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“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.

“A lot of the tools and scans use Microsoft and they use it for emergency medication.

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

“It’s a long surgery, it can be anything from four to seven hours, and [after waiting] at 1:30 p.m. they came back and said there was no way they were going to do it, if it goes down again it’s too risky.

“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.”

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been approached for comment.

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