Two West Texas-area healthcare entities – the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center system and University Medical Center in Lubbock – are days into widespread IT outages, with UMC confirming it is six days into a ransomware attack.
While Lubbock’s other major hospital system Covenant Health, remained unaffected as of late Tuesday, the impact of these technology issues is was impacting patients across West Texas and stretching to college campuses in Dallas, El Paso, Abilene and Amarillo.
When did the West Texas ransomware attack begin?
University Medical Center Healthcare System in Lubbock, a Level 1 trauma center, announced the outage at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 26. The next day, the system confirmed it was being impacted by an ongoing ransomware attack.
“UMC Health System recently detected unusual activity within our IT systems,” the center stated on its website. “Immediately after detecting this activity, our teams launched an investigation and took steps to proactively disconnect our systems to contain the incident. Through the ongoing investigation, we determined that the unusual activity was connected to a ransomware incident.”