Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, New York, was temporarily disrupted by a cyberattack on Tuesday evening, which led to a diversion of emergency room admissions and a temporary re-routing of ambulances to other hospitals. The cyberattack impacted several of the hospital’s computer systems, prompting an immediate response from the hospital staff to isolate the affected systems. The diversion order, which was issued around 8 p.m., lasted until approximately 10:45 p.m. that same night, during which time ambulances were redirected to nearby facilities.
While the hospital worked to assess and contain the situation, spokesperson Melissa Tourtellotte stated that they were in “recovery mode” by 11:30 p.m. The emergency room was once again able to accept new patients, and ambulances resumed normal routing. However, some systems remained offline as the hospital continued working on the recovery process, and the exact motives behind the attack remained unclear.
Due to the nature of the cyberattack, certain critical patients—those suffering from strokes or heart attacks—were temporarily redirected as required by state regulations during such system outages. Patients already in the emergency room or waiting for care during the incident experienced delays, with some even choosing to leave the waiting area in frustration due to the lack of electronic systems for patient check-ins.
The cyberattack did not disrupt the transfer of one patient, who had already been scheduled to be moved to a different hospital before the incident occurred. Despite the chaos caused by the disruption, the situation was contained, and the hospital was expected to restore its systems by the end of the night.
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