Staff at eight NHS hospitals were forced to resort to pen and paper after a fault at a shared data centre cut off access to the Lorenzo patient administration system.
Reports claim that the interruption, which affected Ipswich Hospital and seven other unnamed hospitals, was caused by a hardware glitch at a data centre run by IT services provider CSC.
CSC did not comment on the cause of the fault, which lasted several hours, but it did say that there was no impact on patient care.