A senior physician described the outage as an “unprecedented situation” that created “exceptionally difficult circumstances” and led to a “catastrophic loss of service”.

There is a “significant backlog” in GP practices as a result of the global IT outage and much work has been “pushed into the coming week”, a senior doctor has warned.

“Normal services cannot be resumed immediately,” said Dr David Wrigley, vice-chair of the BMA’s GP committee for England.

He described the outage as an “unprecedented situation” that created “exceptionally difficult circumstances” and led to a “catastrophic loss of service”.

Friday was “one of the toughest days in recent memory for GPs,” Dr Wrigley said.

Many medics were “forced to return to pen and paper” and “much of the work had to be pushed back to the following week”.

NHS England said in a statement on Friday that the outage was “causing disruption to most GP practices”.

Dr Farah Jameel, a GP in central London, said she did not have access to patient details, photo results, medication history and blood tests.

Patients with minor ailments were sent to pharmacies.

According to Dr Wrigley, GPs have “pulled out all the stops” this weekend.

However, the temporary loss of the EMIS patient record system has resulted in a “significant backlog,” he continued.

“Even if we could guarantee that the problem would be fully resolved by Monday, GPs would still need time to make up for the hours lost over the weekend. In addition, NHS England must make it clear to patients that normal services cannot be resumed immediately.”

Work is underway to develop a “better IT backup system to ensure this disaster does not happen again in the future.”

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It may take weeks for the disruption to be resolved

The situation gradually improved over the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon, NHS England reported that systems were “coming back online in most areas”.

However, they were “still a bit slower than normal”.

Pharmacy services have also been significantly disrupted.

Nick Kaye, president of the National Pharmacy Association, expected services to be disrupted this weekend.

A faulty software update is believed to have caused the outage. checks skipped before deploymentexperts say.