[German]A nasty surprise for some clinics and their IT departments. Maintenance technicians from the US provider Oracle unintentionally deleted critical resources during support. As a result, the IT "lights went out" at 45 clinics that were Oracle customers. Oracle Health was no longer running. The clinics had to fiddle with paper and pencil for days. Go to the cloud, they said in IT, you're not responsible there.
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Things are not running well at all for Oracle at the moment. At the end of March 2025, I reported on a cyber incident in the German blog post Oracle Health gehackt, US-Patientendaten abgeflossen. According to reports, cyber criminals penetrated the servers of the US tech company Cerner Oracle Health after January 22, 2025. It is suspected that patient data of US citizens was stolen. Oracle vehemently denied this, then at some point admitted to it in a concealed manner.
Then it became known that Oracle Millennium, a digital medical record system, is probably about to be discontinued in Sweden. I had reported in the German blog post Digitales Krankenaktensystem (Oracle Millennium) in Schweden vor dem Aus? and also mentioned there that Millennium has also been kicked out in numerous other countries.
Oracle engineers caused hospital IT outage
The US medium CNBC reported on April 28, 2025 in the articlea Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals (via) about a veritable fail by Oracle technicians. It affected clinics run by the US provider Community Health Systems (CHS). The Tennessee-based company operates 72 hospitals in 14 US states.
On April 23, 2025, Oracle technicians were carrying out maintenance work and accidentally deleted critical storage media. According to a CHS spokesperson, these were connected to an important database. As a result, the electronic health record (EHR) system known as Oracle Health stopped working.
CHS stated that "several" of its hospitals had been affected and that contingency plans had been activated. That's a shorthand for the fact that medical staff couldn't access electronic patient records. They then switched to paper and pencil to keep the hospital running.
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CNBC writes that the trade journal Becker's Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were affected. The outage lasted from Wednesday, April 23, 2025 to Monday, April 28, 2025.
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this is common practice in the US, and when it happens, the responsible techs usually just get re assigned into a basement office until they get bored and finally quit. Mainly because it costs more to train a new hire to do what the misfortunate IT person does task wise. Plus they can't do anything else except their regular job duties / tasks, and are not included in any extra work ever again. Basically, they're just kept around as a stark reminder to others to not make the same mistake so you don't end up in the basement office with your red Swingline stapler as your only friend just like Milton Waddams in Office Space.