An IT issue which shut down airports, cancelled flights, and took businesses offline led to several Bolton GPs being unable to access patient records.

Of nearly 20 borough GPs contacted by The Bolton News, just one said they were not affected by the outage – which took out the "EMIS" patient record system.

Surgeries including Tonge Fold Medical Centre, The Oaks Family Practice, Olive Family Practice, and Garnet Fold Surgery were all affected – leaving patients unable to book an appointment and staff unable to view records.

Many GP surgeries were advising patients with non-emergency issues to call 111 or to try calling back on Monday, in the hope the issue will be fixed by then.

The worldwide glitch was caused by a software update pushed out by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, affecting companies using some of its software.

Chemotherapy and immunotherapy appointments were also rescheduled after cancer hospital The Christie was affected by the issue.

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NHS England said the outage was causing disruption in ‘the majority of GP practices’ across the country. Manchester Airport was also affected, with some airlines having to carry out check-in and boarding procedures manually, resulting in increased queues.

Local train operator TransPennine Express was also affected, with some station facilities affected. Local ring and ride services were also affected, with customers unable to make bookings, Transport for Greater Manchester.

In the afternoon, North West Ambulance Service said its 111 service had become "very busy".

Cllr Sean Fielding, the council’s cabinet member for health, said: “Our GP surgeries are under a huge amount of pressure as it is, and this IT outage adds considerably to that.

“I know local patients will be frustrated at the difficulty the IT failure has caused but I’d encourage people to be patient as surgery staff and doctors are arguably the most frustrated at having to deal with all of this.”

The issue led to the government holding an emergency Cobra meeting.

Speaking to the BBC, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden said: “Cobra officials met this morning. I’ve been kept updated about the situation throughout the day, the Prime Minister has been kept informed. We will have a further meeting later today to make sure we are across the situation.

“But as far as government services goes, the online services that government provides, these are largely unaffected now, and it’s important that’s the case because a lot of vulnerable people depend on these services.”

Asked about the need for back-up systems after GP surgeries were hit, Mr McFadden said: “What this incident shows is just how dependent we are on IT systems. And when something like this happens, how fast and how widespread the effects are…

“It’s really important, because we’re so reliant on these systems, that the fix is put in place as soon as possible.”

In a statement on social media, EMIS said: “We're affected by a third-party issue that is impacting organisations globally, and we're working with the relevant parties to restore service as soon as possible.”

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CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said the company would “make sure that every customer is fully recovered” from the ongoing global IT outage.

Speaking to NBC’s Today Show in the US, Mr Kurtz said many firms were rebooting their computers and coming back online, but said it could still be “some time” before all systems had completely recovered.

“We’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them – many of our customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said.

“Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were and we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”

Asked if he ever thought an outage of this scale was possible, the CrowdStrike founder said: “Software is a very complex world and there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task.”

If you have a story, I cover the whole borough of Bolton. Please get in touch at jack.fifield@newsquest.co.uk.