Exclusive: An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, which affected more than 1,000 companies and millions of internet users, is believed to have disrupted patient care across several NHS sites. 

A digital chief at an acute trust told Digital Health News that at least 10 NHS sites using Oracle systems, were “in downtime scenarios” on the morning of 20 October 2025.

“Oracle, since buying Cerner, hosts some of its services on AWS and some on their own infrastructure. They’re in the process of moving more to Oracle’s own cloud, but that hasn’t fully happened yet.

“I think it’s worth knowing that if NHS services are dependent on cloud providers and they go down, then it’s probably more important than losing Snapchat,” they said.

The source added that trusts were forced to revert to paper records and business continuity processes, which is likely to have affected patient care.

“When systems go down, especially unexpectedly, it’s disruptive.

“If you know it’ll be an hour, you can plan around it, but if you don’t know how long it’ll last, then gold/silver command gets triggered.

“Decisions need to be made about reverting to continuity procedures and later you’ve got to re-enter data which is very time-consuming,” they said.

They added that the outage “may not have been entirely Oracle-related” and there may have been disruption to NHSE’s Lightweight Directory Access Protocol service, the authentication and identity system used by the Spine Directory Service.

A spokesperson for NHSE told Digital Health News that the issue was not impacting on national NHS services.

NHS sites believed to be affected by the outage include Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Barts Health NHS Trust, Royal Free London, West Hertfordshire Teaching Colleges NHS Trust, Whipps Cross Hospital, County Hospital, Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust, and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust.

A spokesperson for Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust confirmed that the trust had been affected by the outage and temporarily “lost power to desktops”.

British technology firm System C, which supports more than 700,000 users across 400 customers in the NHS, private healthcare and social care, confirmed that the AWS outage had impacted some of its services and it had invoked service business continuity procedures.

In an email, seen by Digital Health News, System C said: “The AWS outage has been widely reported across news channels this morning, and we are alerting you that the vendor of Jira, Atlassian, has also been affected.

“This means that Jira, our Customer Portal and Knowledge Hub, is currently unavailable. Atlassian has published an incident, which is being investigated.”

Amazon confirmed that all AWS services were restored to normal operations by 15.01pm PDT (22.01 GMT) on 20 October but “some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect” continued to have a backlog of messages.

It added that the outage was caused by “DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints”.

Digital Health News contacted Oracle and all the trusts named for comment.