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UNM Health cyberattack: what we know so far (updated Oct 27, 9 AM ET)

The University of New Mexico Hospital and Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque are working to resolve a cyberattack that forced ambulance diversions, canceled academic classes, and disrupted clinic schedules across the system.

What happened

On Monday, Oct 26, 2026, a cybersecurity incident hit the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. Staff began reporting problems around 11:30 a.m. MT. UNM Hospital is the state’s only Level I trauma center.

  • All ambulance traffic was diverted to other hospitals, including ones in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
  • All clinic appointments were canceled across 30+ clinics, including Sandoval Regional Medical Center. Outpatient surgeries were suspended for the rest of the day.
  • Classes were canceled at the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, College of Pharmacy, and College of Population Health. Non-essential staff and students were sent home.
  • UNM’s main campus was not affected.

Where things stand (per UNM, as of Monday night)

  • UNM Health limited new patient arrivals from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. and began restoring systems in phases starting at 2:30 p.m.
  • UNM Hospital and UNM Medical Group employees were told to return to work Tuesday, and patients will be contacted to reschedule missed appointments.
  • HSC academic and research units stay closed Tuesday, Oct 27. All classes, including online ones, are canceled.
  • UNM says security teams contained the event, notified state and federal law enforcement, and brought in outside partners.

What we don’t know

UNM hasn’t said what kind of attack this was, who is responsible, or whether patient data was accessed. If you see claims about ransomware or a data breach, they aren’t confirmed yet.

Background

UNM Health had a separate data breach in 2021 that affected about 637,000 patients, so this is not the first incident. Nothing public links the two.

General context (not specific to this incident)

Healthcare is a frequent cyberattack target because hospitals can’t tolerate long downtime, patient records are valuable, and academic medical centers have large, interconnected networks. Common defenses include network segmentation between clinical and academic systems, offline backups, regular incident-response drills with regional partners, and phishing-resistant MFA.

Sources: UNM HSC updates · Source NM · KRQE · Becker’s

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