World News for Students of English

09-11-2026 15:00

On October 13, Singapore’s public hospitals faced a nine-and-a-half-hour computer system failure. It happened because a tech company hired to update security rules didn’t do the work on time.

The outage affected major services, including booking appointments, giving out medicine, and paying bills. About 4,000 patient visits had to be moved to other days, but no patients were hurt. Health leaders said the problem was not a cyberattack, and no private medical data was stolen. Doctors and nurses quickly used paper rules and manual backups to keep taking care of patients. The health agency is now checking the contractor’s work and fixing the system so that future technical mistakes don’t cause problems again.

Difficult words: failure (a situation in which a system stops working correctly), outage (a period of time when a service, power supply, or computer system is not working), private (belonging to a specific person or group, not public).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.