Server failure at Delhi AIIMS hits OPD, emergency operations

Doctors and administrative staff said that the servers crashed on Wednesday night, making it difficult for medics to access medical records and reports of patients

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) reported a server failure for over 12 hours between Wednesday and Thursday, leading to a long wait at the emergency and outpatient departments (OPDs). The hospital administration said that the server was impacted as part of a “planned maintenance activity” and stressed that it was not an external threat resulting in the outage.

AIIMS spokesperson Dr Rima Dada said, “The servers are fine, and all online activities have resumed. It was a planned maintenance activity,” she said. (HT Archive)

Doctors and administrative staff said that the servers crashed on Wednesday night, making it difficult for medics to access medical records and reports of patients. The situation continued till late on Thursday till afternoon.

“The servers were impacted last evening. We were trying to access files and reports of patients to prepare for the surgeries scheduled for the next day, but could not do so. We had to manually go through the documents. The OPD was also affected in the morning, and it wasn’t until the afternoon that the labs revived online services,” a doctor at AIIMS confirmed, requesting anonymity.

However, AIIMS spokesperson Dr Rima Dada said, “The servers are fine, and all online activities have resumed. It was a planned maintenance activity,” she said.

While the administration stressed that the outage was done to ensure that the systems were maintained, the outage timed during the crucial OPD hours in the morning caused long queues in the hospital. Inconvenienced patients were seen waiting for hours outside the registration counters to get manual patient slips and reports from labs. The emergency department also saw a massive crowd waiting to register themselves manually.

“A nurse was making a list of all the patients. We were asked to collect the registration slips after the consultation because of the large volume of patients. We did not know that the delay was caused due to server failure, but it did take a long time,” said Arindham Sinha, who had an appointment at the gastroenterology department.

AIIMS systems are not new to such server outages. On November 23, the systems at India’s apex medical centre became corrupt due to a ransomware attack, which wiped outpatient and research data from its primary and backup servers. It took nearly a month for the hospital to completely revive from the cyberattack and since then, the government agencies have been working towards rebuilding a secure network for AIIMS’ servers.

The Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) cell had filed an FIR invoking sections of cyber terrorism (IT Act, section 66F) against unknown persons.

Just months after the cyberattack, there were allegations against the AIIMS administration raised by the aspirants of a nursing officer recruitment exam, conducted by the hospital, that they received screenshots and photos of more than 20 questions, which were a part of the question paper.