Major incident declared at Gilbert Bain Hospital after widespread network outage
A MAJOR incident was declared at the Gilbert Bain Hospital on Sunday morning after a widespread power and network outage across Shetland.
SSEN Distribution has apologised to people in Shetland for the outage, which occurred at around 3am, and said it has launched a full investigation.
The company said a localised fault had occurred on the network in mainland Shetland, and that the “systems in place to isolate this fault and prevent further disruption on the network did not operate as they should”.
NHS Shetland announced a major incident at the hospital as a result of the outages on Sunday morning.
It said that though power was only disrupted momentarily before a back-up generator kicked in, there was an “ongoing loss of phones and the bleep system” at the hospital.
“Because the situation outweighed the available resources, a major incident at hospital level was triggered,” NHS Shetland said.
“Staff on duty were then able to make contact with on call clinicians in theatres and labs, who went into the hospital under business continuity arrangements in case there was a requirement to deal with an emergency situation.
“Patients were unaffected by the outage, and everything was back up and running as normal by 6am.”
SSEN Distribution has reassured customers that its contingencies for restoring the network “worked as expected”, with supplies coming back on in stages.
It said the majority of people were reconnected within three hours, with all supplies restored shortly after 7am.
“We’re in touch with NHS Shetland and mobile phone operators to support any reviews they choose to conduct into their own contingency plans,” SSEN said.
“Resilience measures for mobile phone masts and fixed-line telecoms are the responsibility of the operators of these networks.
“At the end of 2026, Shetland’s standby project is due to come into service, which will connect Shetland’s distribution network to the new transmission network. This will further improve the islands’ resilience.”
Meanwhile the West Mainland Leisure Centre said that its a public swimming session was cancelled this morning (Monday) “due to the power cut affecting our plant and water treatment systems”.
It added in a post on Facebook that the hope was to have the issue fixed in time for sessions starting from 6.30pm.
The Hillswick Shop also posted on social media today that “following a power cut our fuel pumps are down”.
Become a member of Shetland News
Shetland News is asking its readers to consider paying for membership to get additional perks:
- Removal of third-party ads;
- Bookmark posts to read later;
- Exclusive curated weekly newsletter;
- Hide membership messages;
- Comments open for discussion.
If you appreciate what we do and feel strongly about impartial local journalism, then please become a member of Shetland News by either making a single payment, or setting up a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription.
Already a member? Sign in to hide this message.
