A 41-year-old woman has undergone surgery to remove a mass from her brain, which was damaged by a global technical glitch at Microsoft

A cancer patient says surgery to remove a mass from her brain was cancelled this week due to the global computer outage

Chantelle Mooney, 41, was due to have a craniotomy on Friday but said the operation was cancelled following the global computer glitch.

Ms Mooney was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which had spread to her lungs.

Three weeks ago she was told that a four-centimetre mass had also been discovered in her brain, after she began to feel weakness on one side.

After initially being postponed on Thursday, Ms Mooney arrived at the Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire on Friday morning expecting to have surgery at 10am.

But as she watched television in the waiting room before being called into surgery, she discovered the news that Microsoft technology was facing outages around the world.

The technical outage, caused by an update sent to customers of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, caused the Windows software to suddenly stop working.

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Chantelle Mooney, 41, (pictured) was due to have a craniotomy on Friday but said the operation was cancelled due to the global computer glitch

Ms Mooney was diagnosed with stage 4B terminal cervical cancer in February 2022, which has spread to her lungs

Mooney later said her surgeon arrived to explain that they were relying on Microsoft technology for scans, emergency medications, access to medical records and more.

After spending the morning waiting to see if the problem would be resolved, Ms Mooney was informed at 1.30pm that the operation would not go ahead and would be postponed until next Friday.

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Ms Mooney, from Great Harwood, Lancashire, said: “I have a secondary brain tumour – my primary diagnosis is terminal cervical cancer.

“The brain tumor was discovered only three weeks ago, it measures four centimeters in diameter and needs to be removed urgently.

“We were watching TV in the waiting room and could see the Microsoft problem happening.

“Ten minutes later, the surgeon came in and said they couldn’t do the operation without Microsoft.

“A lot of tools and analytics use Microsoft and they use it for emergency medicine.

“They said they couldn’t perform the operation until the software was up and running again.

After spending the morning waiting to see if the problem would be resolved, Ms. Mooney was told the surgery would not go ahead that day.

Huge queues of holidaymakers at London Gatwick Airport following global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike software

Passengers at Stansted Airport left in chaos and without flight information after global IT outage

Millions of users and businesses around the world were hit with the “blue screen of death” on Friday as their systems were crippled by the outage.

Rail services remained disrupted in the UK on Saturday. Pictured: A South Western Railway ticket machine was out of service due to the outage

“It’s a long operation, it can last four to seven hours, and (after waiting) at 1:30 p.m., they came back and said there was no chance they would do it, that if it went back down, it was too risky.

“At the time I was upset because it had already been pushed back a day.

“But I didn’t realise how much it would affect the operation, if it were to fall again it would have put my life in danger.”

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She added: “They couldn’t have done brain scans, blood transfusions – they couldn’t even have access to my medical records.

“They really didn’t want to cancel the surgery because of its seriousness, but at the end of the day, my safety comes first.”

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been contacted for comment.

The massive Microsoft outage caused chaos around the world, with flights grounded and hospitals, GP surgeries, rail services, banks, stock exchanges and TV stations taken offline.

The technical outage – caused by an update sent to customers of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike – caused Windows software to suddenly crash, prompting departure boards to immediately go dark at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh.

In a sign of the global impact of the outage, passengers were seen sleeping in the corridors of Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed in terminals across Spain and, in Delhi, staff set up a whiteboard to record departures.

In Australia, stores have closed or gone cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US, emergency services lines have been cut in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Passengers on UK trains have been warned to expect delays due to “widespread IT issues across the network”, while NHS England said patients should attend their GP appointments unless told otherwise due to problems with the appointment booking and patient records system.