In Santa Cruz, CA a network outage that shut down Watsonville Community Hospital's internet connection and electronic systems used for patient charts and prescription notifications has been going on for multiple days. The hospital has resorted to operating on paper to deal with the outage which began on Friday. The exact cause of the outage has not been identified. A third-party information technology specialist has been brought in to investigate whether the hospital was the victim of a cyberattack.

When the hospital officials realized on Friday evening that their computer systems were starting to go down, the hospital initiated its “downtime protocols,” which meant staff switched to using paper-based patient charts and issuing paper prescriptions to patients rather than electronically submitting them to pharmacies. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page