While patient care was not disrupted, the recent healthcare websites outage raises concerns over security and reliability.
SINGAPORE – A recent outage affecting the websites of all public healthcare institutions has sparked concerns and questions over the reliability of government IT platforms. The disruption, lasting for over seven hours on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, was a surprise to many, given the high reliance on digital services in today’s world. The fact that the entire public healthcare system was impacted, not just one institution, intensified the shock.
While the disruption did not affect core healthcare services, such as patient treatment, many wondered why there wasn’t a backup system in place. Cybersecurity experts found that the affected websites shared similar IP addresses, which suggested that the three public healthcare clusters might have been hosted on the same server. This raised concerns about whether a cyber attack was behind the outage and whether sensitive data had been compromised.
Fortunately, Synapxe, the organization responsible for managing the tech platforms of national healthcare institutions, addressed the concerns by stating that there was no evidence of a cyber attack and that data and internal networks had not been compromised. This statement, if proven true after further investigations, would indicate that the disruption was more of an inconvenience rather than a serious breach.
In healthcare, the inability to access cluster websites or even emails does not disrupt the core business of treating patients. As long as patient care is unaffected, the disruption is unlikely to be viewed as critically as banking outages, which directly impact customers’ ability to manage their finances. For the healthcare sector, delays in online services like checking appointment availability or paying bills, while inconvenient, do not pose significant harm.
The incident brought to mind the infamous 2018 cyber attack on SingHealth, in which personal information of 1.5 million patients was stolen, resulting in severe fines for both Integrated Health Information Systems (now Synapxe) and SingHealth. While the recent outage was not as damaging, it nonetheless raises concerns about the security and efficiency of government IT systems.
As of over 24 hours after the disruption, Synapxe has yet to offer a detailed explanation for the incident. While the outage did not directly affect patient care, it may have shaken public trust in the security and reliability of Singapore’s government IT infrastructure, especially after the significant data breach in 2018.
