Phone and internet outages at Monadnock Community Hospital could continue for another five days, with the hospital anticipating servers will remain down through Nov. 18.
“Resuming operations is taking longer than expected and we do not have a restoration timeline at this point,” the hospital said in an email to the community Thursday evening. “Our IT staff and computer specialists are working around the clock so we can resume normal operations.”
The hospital’s satellite offices, Antrim Medical Group and Jaffrey Family Medicine, are affected as well.
The emergency department is open for patients, except for ambulance transports, and patients needing specialized or advanced care will be transferred to the closest appropriate hospital.
All elective surgeries, as well as outpatient laboratory and radiology appointments, are canceled until further notice. The hospital will contact patients to reschedule once it resumes normal operations.
Hospital representatives have declined to answer questions about the outage’s cause.
A similar systems outage occurred at Monadnock Community Hospital after a faulty upgrade about 11 years ago, in September 2015. The hospital canceled some surgeries and outpatient appointments then, as it has now. After that outage, the hospital conducted a root cause analysis to identify system- and user-caused errors that created hidden problems within the health care system.
In the summer of 2024, the hospital also faced an outage when a worldwide IT malfunction disrupted its computer systems. A defective update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, widely used by businesses and government agencies, caused Windows operating systems to crash. It lasted about six hours.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.