LONDON: England’s National Health Service activated contingency plans Friday in response to the global Microsoft outage, reverting to “other IT systems or paper records” to maintain essential care and appointments. “With the global Microsoft issue inevitably having a disruptive impact for staff, local NHS services are enacting long-standing measures to manage IT outages,” a spokesperson said in a statement sent to AFP, acknowledging that the situation has disrupted staff operations. A union leader earlier claimed that the outage was having a “serious impact” on Britain’s state health service. NHS staff receiving emergency calls were “unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos,” Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union, said in the statement. She added, however, that “emergency and life threatening call-outs appear to be unaffected.” NHS England insisted that patients in need of care should continue to call emergency hotline numbers or contact their local pharmacy. The National Pharmacy Association, however, told AFP that the problem was affecting their members’ “ability to communicate” with doctors’ offices, causing delays in dealing with patients’ prescriptions. Microsoft ruled out “malicious” activity for an outage that has left likely millions without access or with limited access to its services, including Outlook and Teams.