Staff at Boston Scientific facilities across Ireland were told to go home on full pay after a major global network outage hit the medical device giant, affecting operations at its Cork plant and other sites around the country.
Workers arrived to find systems down, with the company unable to restore communications quickly enough to keep normal operations running. Rather than keeping staff sitting around waiting, Boston Scientific made the call to send everyone home while technical teams scrambled to get things back up and running.
The outage is understood to be worldwide in scope, meaning the problems hitting Cork were part of a much larger issue affecting the company across multiple countries and time zones. IT teams were working to restore network communications as quickly as possible, though no timeline was given to staff on when systems would be back online.
Boston Scientific has a significant presence in Cork, where it manufactures medical devices that are distributed globally. The Cork facility is one of the company’s key production hubs in Europe, employing a large number of people in the region. Any prolonged disruption to operations there would have knock-on effects for the wider supply chain.
For the workers involved, being sent home on full pay softened the blow of an unexpected day off, but the incident raises questions about how vulnerable large-scale manufacturing operations are to network failures. When systems go down across an entire global organisation simultaneously, there is very little that can be done at a local level until the central issue is resolved.
The company has not yet confirmed what caused the outage or how long it took to fully resolve the situation across its global network.