Several major Toronto hospitals had their digital systems down on Monday, and they are investigating the cause, following which University Health Network issued a "code grey" to indicate a system failure. 

Gillian Howard, a spokeswoman for UHN, said the hospital has been experiencing outages in its digital systems. There are currently "downtime procedures" in clinical areas, Gillian added. 

In a series of tweets issued later Monday evening, the UHN noted that the network had restored service to most departments across the city. However, there may be some challenges getting to some departments due to the outage. Patients should also be prepared for a delay when they arrive at the hospital on Tuesday morning, according to the tweet.   

"In addition to ensuring the safety and well-being of their patients, the hospital ensures that they give patients updates as soon as they have more information," concluded the tweet. 

There was another outage during the day at UHN, which followed a similar outage at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children caused by a ransomware attack last month. As part of the response, the children's hospital announced last week that 80 percent of its priority systems had been restored. It had not paid any ransoms to the hackers. 

In the United States, there is a ransomware group called LockBit, which The Federal Bureau of Investigation has called one of the world's most destructive and active criminal organizations. The group apologized for the hack allegedly committed by a member of the group. 

SickKids was offered a decryptor, but the organization said it was not planning to use it and that its technology department was restoring its systems instead. There has also been an incident where Scouts Canada has been a victim of a cyberattack recently on its "MyScouts" database, which is used to manage programs across the country. Scouts Canada announced only a small number of users had been directly affected by the outage on Monday, but the system remains down. 

The cause of the latest outage at UHN hospital is unclear. However, a research firm has found that cyberattacks on Canadian hospitals increased by 20 percent last year. This is according to data compiled in its report. 

According to a study by Check Point Research, three industries were the most affected in 2022: healthcare, finance, and government. There has been a lot of progress in the public sector regarding privacy and cybersecurity, but more needs to be done to reach "cyber maturity" in the public sector. 

It recommended that across the broader public services sector, the province needs to "enhance existing governance structures to facilitate effective cybersecurity risk management."