Support
You can get notifications about GOV.UK Pay’s status to your email, phone, RSS reader or website, by subscribing on our status page.
After you contact us, the GOV.UK Pay team will contact you using the Zendesk ticketing system.
Report an incident
When you report an incident, we’ll classify the incident as critical, major, significant, or minor. You can see how we respond to each classification differently.
Critical incidents usually involve outages for lots of our services at the same time. An incident could have a large impact on your service, but we might not categorise it as a P1 if other services are not impacted.
During office hours
We support all incidents from 9.30am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday.
Email us at govuk-pay-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
Out of hours support for critical incidents
We offer 24 hour online support for P1 (critical) incidents only.
Check that there are no issues on the GOV.UK Pay status page before using our out of hours support.
You should try to determine if your incident is potentially a critical incident before contacting our out of hours support. Only contact out of hours support if:
- no one in your team can log in
- a significant number of users cannot make a payment
- you believe sensitive data has been leaked
You can find the emergency contact details in your GOV.UK Pay contract or Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), and in the go live email we sent you.
If we classify your incident as less severe than ‘critical’, we’ll do a quick fix if there is one. Then we’ll fully resolve your issue during working hours.
How GOV.UK Pay respond to incidents
How quickly we respond depends on the type of your incident.
| Classification | Type | Example | Initial response time | Update frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Critical | There’s a substantial outage of GOV.UK Pay or a significant security issue | 30 minutes (at any time) | Every hour |
| P2 | Major | There are more errors than usual across multiple services and performance is noticeably degraded | 60 minutes (during office hours) | Every 2 hours |
| P3 | Significant | Paying users or service users are experiencing intermittent or degraded service due to platform issue | 1 working day | Every 2 working days |
| P4 | Minor | A GOV.UK Pay component has failed but it is not immediately impacting services | 2 working days | Weekly |
General feedback
If you have any feedback or questions, email govuk-pay-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
We’ll reply within 2 working days, or one working day if you’re making a request to go live.