UZ Brussel and Belgian hospitals: network and patient-record outage postpones operations, cause unconfirmed
Severity: high · Patch status: unknown · Since 2026-11-10
On 10 November 2026 network and IT problems at UZ Brussel (Jette) cancelled planned operations and all outpatient care for the rest of the day, and ambulances and the emergency department were diverted to other hospitals until further notice. The hospital's spokesperson said there was no indication of a cyberattack and that the cause was still being investigated; no attacker, ransomware strain or group has been named in any report. Reports from ITdaily and VRT attribute the outage to a fault in the electronic patient record (EPD, PrimUZ) that UZ Brussel developed and that other hospitals use, and AZ Monica (Antwerp) and Heilig Hart (Lier) could not view patient records online, so Heilig Hart staff documented on paper; Sint-Andries (Tielt) reported limited disruption on paper, and AZ Jan Palfijn (Ghent) disconnected from UZ Brussel's servers in time. The hospitals say patient safety is not affected. The fault has not been confirmed as the root cause, the hospital could not say whether systems would be back by the next day, and no fix or remediation status has been published, so whether this is an attack or a technical failure remains open.
What to do
- Treat the cause as unconfirmed until UZ Brussel or the Belgian CERT (CCB) publishes a root-cause statement; watch for that statement
- Hospitals and clinics that rely on a shared patient-record platform: map that dependency and keep paper or offline downtime procedures ready, as used at Heilig Hart Lier and Sint-Andries Tielt
- If a cyberattack is later confirmed, verify that backups are isolated and restorable before restoring systems
- Restrict non-essential external network access to hospital systems while the cause is investigated
Sources
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