Ordem dos Médicos demands answers after power outage wipes out records for 150,000 consultations

Outage on Friday

A power failure at the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS) data centre on the morning of 12 June 2026 paralysed IT systems across the country from around 08:50. Doctors were unable to access electronic clinical records, prescribe medication digitally or request diagnostic tests. Pharmacies could not consult the dematerialised prescription database, though SPMS told the Lusa agency that manual prescriptions were permitted under Portaria n.º 224/2015.

SPMS confirmed that services were progressively restored throughout the day and considered the situation normalised roughly nine hours later, at the end of the working day. By 15 June the entity said that “practically all” services were operational again.

Patients left in limbo

The Ordem dos Médicos estimates that previsivelmente more than 150,000 scheduled consultations and clinical acts went without real‑time IT recording. Many appointments “did not take place or were postponed,” the order stated.

Many consultations were not carried out or were postponed. An occurrence with a direct impact on patients’ access to care, on the quality of medical decision‑making and on the organisation of work.

It was the second grave failure of the SNS information systems in less than a month. On 22 May a security incident affected administrative data and clinical information of more than 100,000 users, including children. The Ordem had already asked SPMS for urgent explanations about that breach and says it has yet to receive a reply.

Failures of backup systems

The data centre outage has drawn sharp criticism from Cidadãos pela Segurança (Citizens for Digital Safety). In a statement the initiative noted that any mission‑critical infrastructure should have three layers of protection against power faults: a UPS battery system, diesel generators and a contingency site. It questioned whether any of these worked.

If none of these mechanisms functioned – or if one or all of them simply did not exist – we are facing an architectural failure that goes far beyond a fortuitous ‘accident’: we are facing gross incompetence.

SPMS told Lusa that a second core data‑centre site is being prepared and should be ready by the end of the year to provide “greater redundancy and availability guarantee” for the SNS systems.

Ordem calls for accountability

In a statement issued on 15 June the Ordem dos Médicos demanded urgent clarification from SPMS about the root cause, the length of the outage and the contingency measures adopted. Bastonário Carlos Cortes called the lack of immediate communication “incomprehensible.”

An immediate institutional communication would have been essential to inform and support doctors, protect patients and ensure that professionals knew how to act in the face of the specific problem.

The Ordem intends to request a face‑to‑face meeting with SPMS and insists on a functioning redundancy system. “When IT systems fail, doctors are left without access to indispensable data such as clinical history, usual medication, allergies, test results, prescriptions and referral information,” Cortes warned. “This increases clinical risk and forces decisions to be made under degraded conditions.”

Leadership churn adds to strain

Separately on 15 June the Ordem dos Médicos voiced concern about the rapid turnover of clinical directors inside the SNS. Since 2024, when the Unidades Locais de Saúde model was generalised, around 50 clinical directors have been replaced. The order argues that stable teams are needed, not “successive changes of names,” and that fixing the SNS requires enough doctors, full and stable teams, technical autonomy and working conditions that retain professionals.