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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →The Synnovis ransomware attack disrupted pathology services in south-east London and ultimately led to 11,862 outpatient appointments and elective procedures being postponed at two NHS trusts, according to NHS England’s later count. The “over 6,000” figure was an interim total reported in July 2024, not the final number.
What happened in the Synnovis cyberattack?
On 3 June 2024, Synnovis—a pathology-services partnership co-owned by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and SYNLAB—was hit by ransomware. Synnovis processes tests used across healthcare services, so the disruption affected more than the supplier’s own systems.
The attack interrupted blood, urine and other specimen testing. NHS services prioritised urgent work and relied on mutual aid and alternative providers while Synnovis worked to rebuild its infrastructure.
How many NHS appointments and procedures were postponed?
The numbers changed as the incident continued. NHS England London’s 11 July 2024 update counted 6,199 acute outpatient appointments and 1,491 elective procedures postponed. A later NHS England update reported 10,152 acute outpatient appointments and 1,710 elective procedures postponed at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
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| NHS England count | Acute outpatient appointments postponed | Elective procedures postponed | Combined total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interim update, 11 July 2024 | 6,199 | 1,491 | 7,690 |
| Later final count, reported in 2025 | 10,152 | 1,710 | 11,862 |
The July figure of 6,199 referred to acute outpatient appointments alone; it did not represent the final disruption or include the later total. NHS England’s broader description of the final impact was delays to over 11,000 outpatient and elective-procedure appointments.
Which NHS services and trusts were affected?
Most affected trusts
King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust experienced the greatest operational impact. Primary-care providers and local borough services in south-east London were also affected because they depended on Synnovis for pathology testing.
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What the disruption meant for care
When test capacity fell, clinicians had to prioritise urgent work and use alternative arrangements where available. Delays to pathology can affect the timing of decisions that depend on test results, but the published totals count postponed appointments and procedures; they do not describe every individual patient’s clinical experience.
Was Qilin responsible, and was patient data published?
Contemporaneous reporting attributed the attack to the Qilin ransomware group. NHS England’s official updates describe it as a ransomware attack on Synnovis and document its service and data effects; that is the more precise way to distinguish reported attribution from the official account.
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Criminals published stolen files on 20 June 2024. The material should not be understood as necessarily one complete patient database: NHS England said it could include names, NHS numbers, dates of birth, test codes and, for some people, test results or numerical values. Not all of the stolen data related to patients.
Synnovis obtained a legal injunction intended to prevent people from using or further publishing the data, and reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Because the stolen files were unstructured, incomplete and fragmented, identifying affected organisations and individuals took more than a year. If you are concerned about your own information, rely on direct communications from the relevant NHS organisation or Synnovis rather than assuming that every patient’s data was exposed.
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Did the attack contribute to a patient’s death?
Yes. A UK parliamentary written answer stated that the attack caused delays to over 11,000 outpatient and elective-procedure appointments and “tragically, contributed to the death of a patient.” That is the confirmed public statement; it does not provide further clinical details, so no more specific account of causation can be established from it.
When were services restored?
NHS England said services were fully restored by December 2024. Restoring services did not end the data-response work: the process of determining which organisations and individuals were affected continued into 2025.
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Why the incident matters beyond south-east London
The attack showed how a cyber incident at a shared supplier can disrupt care across multiple organisations that rely on the same clinical service. For healthcare providers, resilience therefore depends not only on protecting each hospital’s own IT but also on understanding supplier dependencies and planning how essential testing can continue during an outage.
The National Cyber Security Centre has described ransomware as “the most acute cyber threat facing the vast majority of UK organisations.” In healthcare, the Synnovis incident illustrates how that wider threat can become an operational and patient-safety problem when a critical service is unavailable.
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