Small private practices and health-care providers are facing mounting financial pressures as crucial reimbursement systems remain down for the ninth day, following the cyberattack on Change Healthcare.
Change Healthcare offers tools for payment and revenue cycle management that help facilitate transactions between providers and most major insurance companies. Its parent company UnitedHealth Group discovered that a cyber threat actor breached part of the unit’s information technology network on Feb. 21, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
As a result, the company isolated and disconnected the impacted systems “immediately upon detection” of the threat, the filing said.
The fallout has caused a ripple of disruption across the U.S. health-care system.
Doctors told CNBC the outage has left them unable to check patients’ eligibility for treatment or fill prescriptions electronically, which has created more administrative responsibility for workers that are already overwhelmed by clerical work. Perhaps more importantly, providers have been unable to receive reimbursements from insurers, effectively grinding many health systems’ revenue cycles to a halt.
Smaller and mid-sized practices that rely on reimbursement cash flow to operate are making tough decisions about how to stay afloat. If the outage drags on for too long, experts say some practices may have to close their doors for good.
Dr. Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist with a private practice in New York City, told CNBC that the breach has been a “mess” and a “big stressor.” Like many others, she said her practice hasn’t been able to receive reimbursements from insurers for patient visits, which makes it difficult for the practice to pay for operational expenses like payroll and medical supplies.
Switching to a new platform could take weeks, Parikh said, so there’s no immediate workaround available. As of Thursday, Change Healthcare has not shared any updates about when it expects its systems to be back online.
“The most frustrating part is that nobody has any answers or solutions,” Parikh said. “We’re kind of just stuck.”
Change Healthcare on Thursday said that ransomware group Blackcat is behind the attack. Blackcat, also called Noberus and ALPHV, steals sensitive data from institutions and threatens to publish it unless a ransom is paid, according to a December release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The company said it is working with law enforcement and third party consultants like Mandiant, which is owned by Google, and cybersecurity software vendor Palo Alto Networks to assess the breach.
“Patient care is our top priority and we have multiple workarounds to ensure people have access to the medications and the care they need,” Change Healthcare said in a statement to CNBC.
Dr. Kiranjit Khalsa, an allergist and immunologist who runs an independent practice in Scottsdale, Arizona, said her staff has been working longer hours to try and accommodate the extra work as a result of the breach, as well as manually calling in prescriptions.
She said the problems around reimbursement have been the “biggest burden,” since she is worried about how she can continue to support her patients and employees. Khalsa is considering cutting back hours for staff and even closing the clinic for a few days.
“I worry about providing for them,” Khalsa told CNBC in an interview. “I also worry about: Where am I going to get this money if it does not come through? Do I need to take a loan out to keep the clinic afloat?”
Even when Change Healthcare’s systems do come back online, there are a lot of unanswered questions about what will happen next, according to Dr. Dan Inder Sraow, an interventional cardiologist who owns a private practice around Phoenix, Arizona. He said it’s not clear whether Change Healthcare will take on the responsibility of processing all the claims or if he’ll need to hire additional staff to help.
“I don’t think that people are aware that the actual people providing the services are not able to extract revenue for those services,” Dr. Sraow told CNBC. “We don’t know how long that’s going to be, and that’s such a dangerous, dangerous thing.”
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association, said he has spent days fielding calls from concerned colleagues.
He said he spoke with one doctor who runs an oncology practice and only has up to two weeks’ worth of cash on hand. If the outage drags out, the practice won’t be able to buy the chemotherapy that its patients depend on for treatment.
Since many providers are operating on razor-thin margins, Ehrenfeld said there is a possibility that some will go out of business.
“We have so many practices that are on the fringe, particularly smaller practices, where they are just scraping by,” Ehrenfeld told CNBC in an interview. “Any aberration in the system where, ‘Oh, you don’t get checks for two weeks,’ obviously is a situation that does put practices at risk.”
In 2022, Change Healthcare merged with the provider Optum, which services more than 100 million patients in the U.S. and is owned by UnitedHealth, the country’s biggest health-care company by market cap.
The American Medical Association vocally opposed the merger, writing in a letter to the DOJ that the union could stifle competition, give UnitedHealth access to large data stores and potentially disrupt patient care.
The merger ultimately went through, but the DOJ has recently launched an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth, according to a Wall Street Journal report Tuesday.
“It’s just sort of like a perfect storm of regulatory issues [and] lack of competition — and unfortunately, the people who are really going to suffer are patients and individuals who work in the healthcare system,” said Dr. Ravi Parikh, a retina specialist that owns and operates a practice in New York City.
The cyberattack has left Parikh’s clinic without a way to receive reimbursements for the expensive medications it administers. He said he has been thinking about contingency plans, such as seeking out cheaper medications and asking some patients to pay upfront, but his focus is on providing the best care possible.
“The health care system could eventually come to a halt because a lot of clinics and pharmacies might not be viable,” Parikh said.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.