Government online services knocked out by 'technical error'

Technicians are believed to have filled in a settings page incorrectly

Most of the Government’s online public services were knocked out by a “technical error” on Wednesday, the Cabinet Office has confirmed.

The entire GOV.UK website, a flagship project of the Government Digital Service (GDS) went down, taking all government department websites and most services with it.

GOV.UK was launched to fanfare 2012 and aims to consolidate all government department websites into a single service – meaning its failure interrupted services ranging from tax self assessment to driving licence applications.

Initial speculative fears that the half-hour outage was caused by a cyber attack appear to be unfounded.

The outage started at around 3.30pm when users were presented with a so-called “NXDOMAIN” error. This error type indicates that the domain name – or web addressed – passed to would-be users of the website is wrong.

The error appeared to be caused by as few as six missing characters not inputted into the website’s settings page, which would be manually filled in by a technician.

The domain name related problems come after a high–profile hack attack against a major domain name service in the United States – Dyne Inc. That attack effectively downed one of the internet’s key “switchboards” and set to outages across popular websites in the United States.

The timing of the error – and the fact that a domain name settings page rarely needs to be changed – suggests that GDS technicians may have been updating or strengthening the domain name security settings on government websites to prevent an attack like the one on Dyne Inc.

During the attack the website was reported to be serving the domain “www-cdn.production.govuk.service.” instead of the correct “www-cdn.production.govuk.service.uk”.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office, which manages GOV.UK 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.”