New Delhi: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) reported a server failure for over 12 hours between Wednesday and Thursday, causing long delays at emergency and outpatient departments of the premier hospital.

The hospital administration said “planned maintenance activity” caused the impact, and stressed that it was not an external threat that resulted in the outage.

Doctors and administrative staff said servers crashed Wednesday night, making it difficult for medics to access medical records and patient reports. The situation remained the same until late Thursday afternoon.

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

Dr Rima Dada, AIIMS spokesperson, however, said that the servers were impacted as a result of a planned maintenance activity.

“The servers are fine, and all online activities have resumed. It was a planned maintenance activity,” she said.

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

“A nurse was making a list of all the patients and 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 because of server issues, but it did take a long time,” said Arindam Sinha, who had an appointment with the gastroenterology department.

The server system at AIIMS systems is not new to server outages. On November 23, the systems at India’s apex medical centre were corrupted by 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 recover from the cyber attack and since then, government agencies have worked 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 in the November case.