Auckland City Hospital has admitted backup power generators failed during a 23-minute power outage on Tuesday morning.
The hospital was working on improving their power systems "as part of a planned programme of work and unfortunately an error occurred," Auckland's Te Whatu Ora director of operations Mike Shepherd told Newshub.
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Shepherd said an "Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS)" system was able to maintain power to critical services and pieces of equipment such as theatres and Intensive Care Units.
"No patients were harmed, and everyone remained safe throughout," he said.
"Our back-up generators weren’t able to contribute to the solution in this particular outage."
The power outage affected other hospital departments and equipment.
"Power to these essential service supplies were restored within 10 minutes and our site was back operating on mains power within 23 minutes."
Most scheduled appointments continued over the Tuesday, but some planned surgical procedures were postponed while they restored all power systems, Shepherd said.
"We are sorry for this; we thank patients and whānau for their understanding," he said.
"We are of course investigating the circumstances of the outage, and as always, look to learn from these situations and improve our systems."
Regarding the generators not working, Shepherd said "we'll be looking into this further so that in future we can restore power to non-critical systems quicker".
