GP practice outages caused by IT firewall issue

A network outage which disrupted access to clinical systems at several GP surgeries was caused by an issue with the practices’ IT firewalls.

NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit was investigating the issue last week, which caused several surgeries to lose internet connection and be unable to access e-consults.

A spokesperson for NHS Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board (ICB) told Digital Health News that the problem was caused by “an intermittent issue with some practice IT firewalls” and said that full internet access is being restored across affected GP practices.

“We are thankful to hard-working practice staff, who continued to care for patients during this challenging time, and patients for their understanding while engineers identified the problem and put a fix in place,” they added.

Bexhill Primary Care Network in East Sussex and Aylesham Medical Practice in Kent, were among surgeries to be affected by the outage which began on 16 April.

Kent and Medway ICB said that the impact was intermittent, with different sites affected at different times, and was not limited Kent and Medway.

It added that all networks and data remained secure during the outage and that GP practices remained open, with technical workarounds and business continuity plans in place to maintain secure access to systems and files for staff.

A spokesperson for NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit said that the outages were driven by “temporary network capacity issues which have limited access to data centre services during peak usage periods.”

“NHS organisations, GP IT suppliers, network providers and system vendors are collaborating under formal incident management arrangements to resolve the issue quickly and safely.

“Hundreds of practices have now been migrated to an enhanced VPN solution which has reduced service disruption and increased network stability.

“Technical teams are monitoring migrated practices to ensure a successful transition and no further issues have been reported,” they added.

Commenting on the issue Saif Abed, founding partner of cybersecurity advisory services, The AbedGraham Group, said: “This highlights how important it is for NHS organisations to monitor and manage their entire supply chain as a source of clinical risk.

“The most common sources of clinical risk are not just clinical applications but, in fact, their underlying critical network infrastructure which is not currently being managed with the same level of clinical safety oversight.”

The disruption follows a major IT failure on 19 January 2026 which affected GP practices across Kent and Medway, leaving clinicians and administrative teams at several surgeries unable to access patient records, medication histories, appointment systems or telephone systems.