Chaos as Eastern Health hospitals hit with ‘code yellow’

Two major hospitals have been thrown into chaos as a widespread IT outage continues to cause patient delays.

Two Melbourne hospitals have been thrown into chaos after a widespread IT outage caused major patient delays.

A “code yellow internal emergency” was declared by Eastern Health on Thursday morning, which operates Box Hill, Maroondah, Angliss and Ferntree Gully hospitals.

Staff are believed to be unable to access their emails, phones, or patient’s medical records.

Eastern Health said there is no evidence of a cyber attack at this point.

Box Hill hospital in Melbourne has been impacted by the outage. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

“The issue has been caused by a critical core switch outage that we are currently working to rectify,” the service’s statement read.

“Hospital systems have reverted to downtime procedures and business continuity plans have been enacted.

“We will continue to keep our staff, patients and healthcare partners informed as the situation unfolds.”

More to come.

Originally published as Chaos as Eastern Health hospitals hit with ‘code yellow’