Anxious travellers have been contacting NHS Digital to ask about the NHS Covid Pass, which suffered a widespread outage on Wednesday (October 13).
The feature in the NHS smartphone app should allow users to access a barcode or text records about which vaccine doses they have had, to enable them to travel overseas.
Instead, users are receiving error messages or a notice saying that high traffic volumes are “limiting access to the service”.
NHS Digital said on Twitter that it is investigating the issue.
“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,” said the statement on Twitter.
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.
— NHS Digital (@NHSDigital) October 13, 2021
Many replies to the tweet were from worried travellers who were not sure they could prove their vaccinated status – including one person who claimed they missed their flight because of the problem.
It is possible to save an offline version of the Covid Pass, which remains valid for 30 days. Some users can screenshot their barcode and iPhone users can also save a version to their Apple Wallet.
But those methods needed to have been done before the system went down.