The system's failure has now lasted more than 24 hours, Te Whatu Ora said. Efforts to fix the issue are still ongoing.
The hospital first experienced problems with its external data centre - responsible for running its online systems - about 9.15am yesterday.
The “instability” at the data centre has been caused by a switch fault, incident controller Becky Hickmott said.
As a result of the fault, inbound and outbound messaging within the hospital has been intermittent and there have been outages on some of the hospital’s online applications.
The applications are used by frontline staff such as nurses.
Hickmott said staff had plans in place for the outages and are following them.
However, the contingencies mean staff are now using whiteboards, pens and paper to record patient information
Online prescriptions have been moved to paper for the pharmacy, and staff now use Microsoft Teams and text messaging systems to communicate.
“Our teams are closely monitoring patient care,” Hickmott said when the outage was initially confirmed yesterday.
A later statement from Te Whatu Ora on Thursday morning said there are “no significant changes to report” with the outages.
“The teams are still working on a fix, and staff are still using manual systems,” the statement said.
It comes after Te Whatu Ora faced significant issues within another one of its South Island hospitals throughout Thursday when Dunedin Hospital was put under code red. This meant eight surgeries were deferred at the hospital due to a lack of available beds.
In February, Christchurch Hospital was left in total darkness due to an hour-long major power blackout which was initially blamed on the hot weather affecting the systems.
By Nathan Morton
