England's National Health Service (NHS) reported that a global tech outage on Friday disrupted the booking of doctors' appointments and patient records.

However, emergency services remained unaffected.

The outage, linked to cyber security firm Crowdstrike and its impact on Microsoft Windows operations, affected various industries worldwide, including airlines, banking, and broadcasting.

NHS England acknowledged issues with its EMIS patient and record system due to the outage, which disrupted operations in most GP (family doctor) practices.

"The NHS has longstanding measures to manage such disruptions, including the use of paper patient records, handwritten prescriptions, and traditional phone systems to contact GPs," an NHS spokesperson stated.

"There is currently no known impact on 999 or emergency services, so people should use these services as they usually would," the spokesperson added.

Following a national election win earlier this month, new health minister Wes Streeting has declared the NHS "broken" and initiated an independent investigation into the health service. He is also negotiating with junior doctors to end strikes that the previous government said hindered efforts to reduce long waiting lists.

Compounding the issues, the NHS experienced a cyber attack last month that disrupted a lab processing blood test results, affecting thousands of appointments and operations.

A UK government security source indicated that Friday's global outage was not considered a malicious act.

NHS England advised patients to attend previously booked appointments as usual and to contact their doctor only for urgent matters.