Data center outage leaves Portugal’s National Health Service without prescriptions

Our take – ONQU

A data centre outage at Portugal's National Health Service left patients without prescriptions, showing how one failure can halt care across a whole health system. The disruption affected the National User Registry and the Electronic Medical Prescription (PEM), as well as access to the Electronic Health Record, so clinicians lost the digital tools they rely on every day. For UK IT leaders and database teams, the lesson is that critical systems such as electronic patient records must be designed for resilience from the start, not treated as separate from the infrastructure beneath them. Ask which services depend on each other, where the single points of failure sit, and whether losing one platform would also take down prescribing or record access. Practical steps include mapping dependencies between identity registries, prescribing tools and clinical records, testing failover on a schedule rather than assuming it works, and confirming that backups can be restored within the time your services can tolerate. Where databases are ageing or spread across SQL Server, PostgreSQL or SAP estates, legacy modernisation and managed services can reduce the risk of an outage spreading. At ONQU, we support database and infrastructure teams running critical data systems across the UK, and we are happy to talk through how your own estate would hold up.