The government’s GOV.UK website was unavailable to citizens on Wednesday afternoon due to a technical error, the Cabinet Office has said.
The Government Digital Service team has now fixed the problem that brought GOV.UK down – Photo credit: Flickr, marie-lyse briffard, CC BY-SA 2.0
GOV.UK, the Government Digital Service’s flagship project, was out for almost half an hour, leaving its websites and many of its online services unavailable to users.
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: “A technical error resulted in GOV.UK going down for 25 minutes this afternoon. This was not caused by a malicious attack and has now been resolved.”
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The news follows a similar event last week, with tweets from the GOV.UK account indicating that the fault lasted longer. An initial message acknowledging the issue came at 6.20pm, while a second saying that GOV.UK was back online did not come until 9.13pm.
Reports suggest that yesterday’s fault was due to a domain name error during an update of the domain name security settings on GOV.UK by technicians.
No further information on the cause of the problem was given by the Cabinet Office.
