The NHS Covid Pass, which is used to show people’s vaccination status to allow them to travel and go to events, suffered an outage lasting just under two hours today.

Other elements of the NHS app that houses the Covid Pass continued to work normally, but when users tried to access the Covid Pass, they got an error message. Mine told me that “An unexpected error has occurred” when I tried to access it just after 3pm.

NHS Digital reported the outage in a tweet at 1.37pm today saying:
“There are currently issues with accessing the Covid Pass on the NHS App and website. We are investigating the issue and will update as soon as we can.”

One reply to the tweet reads: “Cheers guys missed my flight with it”, while another asked: “On a flight in half an hour, what do I do?”

Another said: “This has been an absolute nightmare. We’re stuck here in Greece as they wouldn’t let us on plane without a pass – are you going to reimburse us for the missed flights and hotel? Of course there was NO ONE we could contact about this also.”

There was no mention of the outage, nor any advice what to do in the absence of the digital pass, on the NHS Digital website.

The problem appears to have been resolved around 3.30pm, on my version of the app at least, though if it has, NHS Digital doesnt yet seem to have got round to upddating its tweet to reflect the fact.