Following outages caused by a cyberattack last week, the phones, email and electronic systems at Chicago’s Lurie Children’s Hospital remained down into this week.

The hospital’s systems went down on Wednesday morning, with the hospital calling the issue a “network outage” until identifying the problem as a “cybersecurity matter” in a Facebook post late Thursday night.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the hospital had not said that the systems had returned to normal.

Hospital officials have not specified the nature of the cyberattack, nor have they said whether they have received ransom demands.

“We acknowledge the inconvenience and concern this system outage causes for our patient families, team members, and community providers.  … We recognize the frustration of not having clarity on when this will be resolved. Our investigation remains ongoing and we are working around the clock to resolve this matter,” hospital officials said Monday in their last public statement.

The hospital is still open to existing and new patients for “emergency care, inpatient care, surgical procedures and ambulatory visits.”

While the outage continues, the hospital is unable to accept emails from or send emails to addresses outside its own network and cannot receive external phone calls except those made to their call center.
For doctors in the wider Lurie network, communication lines have been established so that patients can continue to get care.

“At first, we had some patients having trouble communicating with their specialists … Lurie has made sure they’re in good contact with their referring general pediatricians,” Dr. Andy Bernstein, an Evanston, Illinois, pediatrician, told WLS-TV.

The FBI continues to investigate the cyberattack and outage, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.