Ransomware Attacks Disrupt Hospitals From Los Angeles to Romania and the NHS

Ransomware attacks have repeatedly crippled hospital operations, forcing providers to divert care, lose access to critical systems, and in some cases pay attackers to recover. At Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, malware encrypted files and disrupted the hospital's computer network, prompting executives to pay about $17,000 in bitcoin after attackers reportedly reduced an initial demand of $3.4 million. The outage interfered with administrative functions and highlighted how cyberattacks on healthcare can create direct patient-safety risks.

The threat later scaled across national healthcare systems. The WannaCry outbreak spread to nearly 100 countries and severely impacted the UK's NHS, knocking hospitals and clinics offline and disrupting appointments and treatment. In Romania, a ransomware attack on a healthcare IT platform left multiple hospitals offline, underscoring how attacks on shared digital infrastructure can cascade across many facilities at once and paralyze care delivery well beyond a single organization.