LAST UPDATE | 4 Jun

COMPUTER SYSTEMS ACROSS the health service are back up and running after some of the systems were down for several hours this afternoon, the HSE said.

The period in which the systems went down followed a company that holds data belonging to the HSE becoming the subject of a ransomware attack, The Journal understands.

A spokesperson for the HSE denied that the network failing was the result of a cybersecurity issue.

“There was a technical issue this afternoon which impacted HSE internet traffic. As a result of this technical issue, there was limited or no access to several national IT and telephone systems for a number of hours,” she said.

“It was a networking problem and not related to any cybersecurity issue. Access to these systems has now been restored.”

Staff in different sectors of the HSE reported being unable to access their email or the internet during the outage.

A source told The Journal that the HSE itself has not been targeted, but is affected by a cyberattack on a third party.

Staff at a Dublin hospital received an email this afternoon telling them of “widespread issues ongoing” with one of its central systems.

They were told that the issues were only affecting new users logging in.

With reporting by Niall O’Connor and Eimer McAuley