IT girl 'Amanda' powers on despite global outage

One new recruit kept calm and carried on as IT outages caused chaos around the world on Friday.

GPs in Peterborough were forced to switch to old technology when one of their systems went down.

They wrote out prescriptions with a pen and asked patients to take paper slips to the Graham Young Pharmacy in Lincoln Road.

But "Amanda", the pharmacy's robot dispenser, powered on through.

Manager Abby Chadwick said the IT system which linked the pharmacy to local GP surgeries failed.

But she said the pharmacy's internal system kept working - so "Amanda" was able to run up and down shelves as usual.

"The outage meant that the GPs couldn't send prescriptions through to us at the push of a button as usual," said Mrs Chadwick.

"They wrote them out and people bought them over.

"We then had to type the details into our system and pass instructions to Amanda.

"We were slower than usual but Amanda wasn't affected."

Mrs Chadwick said "Amanda" was just over a year old and had been named after NHS boss Amanda Doyle.

She said the robot moved up and down shelves picking up drugs and medicines after being given instructions.

The system had gone down at about 07:00 BST and started to return to normal shortly before 17:00, she said.

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