Phone and internet outages continue at Monadnock Community Hospital, impacting its satellite offices in Antrim and Jaffrey.
Both Antrim Medical Group and Jaffrey Family Medicine are affected and the hospital is still not accepting inbound emergency patients, according to a press release from Laura Gingras, the hospital’s vice president of community relations, Wednesday evening.
The emergency department remains open, 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.
Gingras characterizes the issue as a “server outage affecting several hospital systems, including telephone services.”
Alycia McDuff, the marketing and communications manager, and Gingras have declined to answer questions about the outage timeline or its cause.
“Our IT team, hospital leadership and external techonology partners are working around the clock to investigate the cause of the outage, assess its impact and restore affected systems as quickly and safely as possible,” Gingras said.
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.