Tunbridge Wells Hospital at Pembury and Maidstone Hospital cannot send or receive emails in the Microsoft outage. Patients should attend appointments as planned and phone, not email.

Patients from Tonbridge with appointments at Tunbridge Wells Hospital in Pembury or at Maidstone Hospital should turn up as planned, the hospitals’ trust said today. The trust cannot send or receive emails because of a worldwide Microsoft outage.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust posted the notice at 10.38am on Friday 13 November. It said there is no need to call ahead to check an appointment. (Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust)

Tunbridge Wells Hospital is at Pembury, about four miles south-east of Tonbridge town centre.

What the trust is asking patients to do

  • keep your appointment and follow the instructions you were already given
  • do not ring to check that it is still going ahead
  • phone, do not email, if you urgently need a service about an appointment that is coming up soon
  • use NHS 111 online and 999 as normal: the trust said both are unaffected

The trust’s switchboard numbers are 01892 823535 for Tunbridge Wells Hospital and 01622 729000 for Maidstone Hospital. (Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust)

Is the outage over?

Not at the time of writing. On Friday evening, Microsoft’s service status page still reported a “service degradation” on Microsoft 365. It said users “may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services”. (Microsoft service health status)

The trust said it would issue further updates as soon as they were available.

What it means for you

If you have a hospital appointment over the weekend or early next week, go. An email from the hospital may be late, and an email you send may not arrive. For anything urgent about an appointment, use the phone.

For urgent medical help, NHS 111 and 999 are working normally.