Alberta Health Services is asking for a third party to review the cause of a significant network crash that happened on Monday.

The province-wide crash affected many clinical systems including Connect Care. The crash prompted EMS dispatch to switch to backup procedures, while laboratory services and Alberta 811 also experienced disruptions.

“It is imperative that we understand what happened [Monday] so that it does not happen again,” said Dr. John Cowell, AHS Official Administrator.

“I would like to thank Albertans for their patience, as well as the teams involved in getting our systems back up and running.”

The outage prompted AHS to postpone and delay some elective and non-urgent surgeries, meanwhile urgent and emergency surgeries continued throughout the day. 811 Health Link operated for most of the day with limited access before returning to full capacity Monday afternoon.

AHS apologized for the disruption in a media release issued Monday evening.