By John Mutiso
The Social Health Authority (SHA) has issued a notice to healthcare providers alerting them to a widespread outage affecting critical digital services.
In a statement addressed to healthcare providers on Tuesday, November 18, SHA CEO Mercy Mwangangi confirmed the severity of the issue and apologized for the resulting disruption to medical services across the country.
“This is to formally notify you of a widespread service interruption and downtime affecting the Digital Health Agency’s services, which are critical to the Social Health Authority (SHA) operations.
“We have received notification from our service provider. Digital Health Agency indicating a major incident leading to significant system unavailability,” the notice read.
Mwangangi expressed regret for the inconvenience caused to healthcare teams and patients, and acknowledged the role digital systems play in health service delivery.
“We understand the critical nature of these services for your daily operations and patient care, and we sincerely apologize for the significant inconvenience and disruption this is causing,” the notice added.
SHA noted that technical teams are working round the clock to resolve the issue, in collaboration with the Digital Health Agency.
“Our technical teams, in close collaboration with the Digital Health Agency, are fully mobilized and working with the highest urgency to identify the root cause and restore full functionality as quickly as possible,” the statement concluded.
Notably, for the better part of Tuesday, Cloudflare which provides tools to help websites fight off cyberattacks and load content efficiently experienced a major global outage.
The downtime temporarily took down several high-profile services including X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, and thousands of websites.
The outage resulted in users encountering widespread 500 internal server errors as many platforms became inaccessible.
The disruption was linked to a sudden spike in unusual traffic, which triggered failures in Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Although the American company confirmed it was not a cyberattack, the exact cause of the traffic surge is still under investigation.
