Government online services knocked out by 'technical error'

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.