Accurx investigating post-Bank Holiday national outage

Accurx has apologised to GP practices using its online consultation tool after an outage affected its systems on Tuesday morning.

The technology company said there was a 41-minute period where patients were not able to access triage forms.

Although it has identified that ‘one device’ appeared to load a patient triage form ‘over one million times within a few minutes’, the company said it had not identified ‘any evidence of malicious activity’.

An email to customers said: ‘We’re really sorry for the disruption you and your patients experienced yesterday morning. We recognise that the timing immediately after a Bank holiday will have made this particularly challenging for practices managing high demand.

The update explained: ‘On 5 May 2026 between 08:02 – 08:43am patients were intermittently unable to access the Patient Triage form for their practice. Some Accurx links in patient messages also failed to load during this period, although patients would have received messages as normal.  

It added: ‘We have identified a highly unusual event where a single device appears to have attempted to load one practice’s patient triage form over one million times within a few minutes.

It explained that this is equivalent to the number of requests that would be expected across the whole country over the space of a week.

‘At the same time, our systems experienced compounding failures which contributed to wider disruption across other practices. At this stage, we are investigating whether these events were directly related’, it said.

Accurx said it was already ‘actively involved’ with the practice involved as part of its investigation into the matter.

The company also said it has ‘implemented immediate mitigations and are implementing further changes to prevent this happening in the future’.

It said this included:

• Enhanced detection of abnormal traffic patterns.
• Introducing rate-limiting measures to prevent extreme volumes of requests from overwhelming the system.
• Rearchitecting our patient-facing services to prevent a compounding failure.

The company said: ‘We will complete a full post-incident review and share a detailed report on our user support page once our investigation is complete, including any further actions we are taking.

‘We know Patient Triage is critical to your ability to deliver care and safely manage demand, and are taking this incident seriously.’

Last year, GP practices were asked to review and correct 57,000 patient records containing vaccination coding errors, after an IT fault which affected Accurx’s Batch Messaging system.