Date of incident: Friday, 9th January 2026
Time: 12:13 - 12:39 (26 minutes)
Status: Resolved
What happened?
On Friday, the 9th of January, Accurx experienced a temporary service disruption that impacted access to web-based functionality. While core services were restored in 26 minutes, a subsequent investigation on Monday, the 12th of January, revealed that certain messages sent during the outage window were not successfully delivered to patients.
What was impacted?
This incident specifically affected simple, text-only patient messages.
The following message types were NOT affected:
Messages with booking links
Questionnaires
Attachments
Messages with reply options
Batch messages
During the incident, simple patient messages could not be created or sent successfully. As a result, the content of the affected messages could not be recovered. This impacted up to 33,350 Conversations.
What caused it?
The disruption was triggered by a configuration change during routine system maintenance involving our database connectivity.
Due to a pre-existing error-handling bug, the system did not correctly notify users that these messages had failed. Instead, the messages may have appeared to be sent successfully but were never created in our database or delivered to the patient.
What we did to fix it?
During the disruption, we notified users via our status page to ensure visibility to all those subscribed.
In the immediate response, our engineers manually reverted the change to reestablish connectivity with the database and resume normal functionality at 12:39.
We continued to carry out a thorough post-incident investigation, in which we identified that some patient messages sent during the incident were not delivered to the patient. The content of these messages would not be visible within the inbox.
These messages may have appeared to be sent with no obvious failed delivery status or notification.
In response to this, we sent direct communications to all impacted users on Tuesday, the 13th of January, containing direct links to each conversation affected. We also notified those with admin rights at each of the organisations involved with details of the users whose messages were impacted, to ensure that they had oversight. We subsequently shared an overview of the incident with the respective ICBs/Health Boards/Trusts for visibility.
What’s next?
Since taking place, relevant technical teams have engaged in a retrospective to discuss the root cause of the incident and establish appropriate preventative actions.
We are committed to ensuring this does not happen again and are taking the following steps:
Change Management: Updating our release processes for infrastructure changes.
Error Handling Audit: Reviewing all error-handling patterns to ensure users are always notified of failures appropriately.
Static Analysis: Implementing new tooling to prevent similar bugs from being introduced in future code updates.
Audit Hardening: Improving how we audit message requests to allow for better data recovery in the event of a failure.
These improvements are a priority, and we’re committed to delivering the reliability you expect from Accurx.
If you have any remaining questions or concerns, please reach out to our support team.
We sincerely apologise for the disruption and thank you for your patience as we work to make our systems even more resilient.