In its latest statement, which was issued at 22:00 BST on Wednesday, the Southern Health Trust confirmed that IT issues which caused disruption “have been resolved and all systems have been restored”.

“We will be testing our systems overnight and they will be reconnected in a phased manner tomorrow (Thursday),” it added.

The trust said the cause of the outage is not suspected to be related to cyber issues.

Although most planned surgeries and hospital appointments have been cancelled, the trust said its community services “are expected to operate as normal” on Thursday.

Affected patients have been contacted and cancelled appointments are to be rescheduled as soon as possible, the trust added.

Throughout the incident, the Southern Trust said it had prioritised emergency and critically ill patients, but it has asked people to still avoid coming to emergency departments “unless absolutely necessary”.