A cancer patient has said surgery to remove a four-centimetre mass from her brain was cancelled last week, due to the worldwide IT glitch.  

Chantelle Mooney, 41, was due to have a craniotomy on Friday, July 19, but says the surgery was cancelled due to the worldwide Microsoft problems.

Chantelle, from Great Harwood, was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022 - which spread to her lungs. 

She was then told three weeks ago a mass had also been found in her brain after she started experiencing weakness down one side.  

After initially being pushed back from Thursday, Chantelle arrived at Royal Preston Hospital on Friday morning expecting to go into surgery at 10am.  

Chantelle Mooney's surgery was cancelled for her own safetyChantelle Mooney's surgery was cancelled for her own safety (Image: SWNS)

But while she was watching TV in the waiting area before being called into theatre, she spotted the news that Microsoft technology was facing outages across the globe. 

She said 10 minutes later her surgeon arrived to explain they relied on Microsoft technology for scans, emergency medication, accessing medical records and more. 

After spending the morning waiting to see if the issue would be solved, at 1.30pm she was told the surgery would not be going ahead and was going to be pushed back to next Friday. 

Chantelle said: “I've got a secondary brain tumour – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer. 

“The brain tumour was only found three weeks ago, it’s four centimetres across and has to be removed as an emergency.

“We were watching TV in the waiting room and could see the Microsoft issue going on. 

"Ten minutes later the surgeon came in and said they can’t do the surgery without Microsoft.

"A lot of the tools and scans use Microsoft and they use it for emergency medication. 

“They said they can't do the surgery until the software comes back up. 

“It’s a long surgery, it can be anything from four to seven hours, and [after waiting] at 1.30pm they came back and said there was no way they were going to do it, if it goes down again it’s too risky. 

“At the time I was upset because it had already been pushed back by a day. 

“But I didn't realise how much it would have affected the operation, if it went down again it would put my life at risk. 

“They wouldn't have been able to do brain scans, blood transfusions - they couldn't even access my medical records. 

“They really didn't want to cancel the surgery because of how serious it is but end of the day my safety comes first.” 

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been approached for comment.

The British Medical Association (BMA) warned on Sunday that normal GP service “cannot be resumed immediately” after the outage caused a “considerable backlog”.

The trade union for doctors said GPs would “need time to catch up from lost work over the weekend”, adding that NHS England should “make clear to patients” this was the case.

An NHS spokesperson said: “Systems are now back online, and patients with an NHS appointment this week should continue to attend unless told not to.

“Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff throughout this incident we are hoping to keep further disruption to a minimum, however there still may be some delays as services recover, particularly with GPs needing to rebook appointments, so please bear with us.

“It’s important that patients attend appointments as normal unless told otherwise. You can contact your GP in the usual way, or use your local pharmacy, NHS 111 online or call 111 for urgent health advice.”