UnitedHealth confirms Optum hack behind US healthcare billing outage

UnitedHealth Group confirmed a major cybersecurity incident on the Optum/Change Healthcare platform that disrupted dozens of healthcare services and payment processing across the U.S.; the company isolated affected systems and providers (including hospitals, pharmacies, and military pharmacies) were advised to disconnect. The outage affected at least 119 services, caused widescale billing and prescription processing failures, prompted organizations like Columbia University and the American Hospital Association to block or disconnect Optum domains, and investigators warned the incident bears the hallmarks of ransomware and possible data exfiltration (later reporting linked the outage to BlackCat).