Sky Broadband Users Accidentally Blocked from UK NHS Website and App
Some customers of Sky Broadband reported that they were unable to access the main NHS website and app earlier in the week, seemingly after the internet provider accidentally managed to block it. But Sky has since suggested that the fault might have been with the NHS. The issue prevented people being able to access their medical data and manage appointments etc.
The problem appears to have occurred on Tuesday morning (23rd June 2026) and was reported across social media (X, Facebook etc.), including via threads on Reddit and Sky’s Community Forum. Customers initially thought the problem was with the NHS itself, but the health service instead pointed the finger of blame at the ISP (no other internet providers seem to have experienced the issue).
“NHS IT Dept tells me that there is a national issue affecting Sky Broadband customers who are unable to access NHS networks remotely, potentially due to a ‘dynamic DNS assignment’,” said one of Sky’s customers on their forum, while another added: “When I’ve spoken to my Practice they say their NHS IT service are saying there is a major issue with Sky Broadband accessing any NHS sites and they are advising everyone to phone Sky.”
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The good news, according to a Sky Support agent, is that the problem was finally resolved before 4pm on the same day. “The NHS has implemented a fix on their end and we believe this should be fully resolved for our customers now. I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you today,” said Sky’s agent.
A smaller smattering of customers had previously reported some brief but similar issues with NHS access, occurring both the day before and the day after the main disruption. The connectivity problems came a couple of months after Sky accidentally managed to block Secure Shell (SSH) communications to Bitbucket.org, which is a cloud-based Git repository hosting service that is designed for professional software (business) teams (here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Oh, that’s what the issue was, same on NOW TV, their (ipv6) DNS servers were not returning anything for (some?) NHS domains, changing the device to Google DNS fixed it.
I always use independent DNS servers (Quad9 and Cloudflare). Unfortunately many ISP supplied routers do not allow the customer to change DNS settings which means you have to set DNS on individual devices but again many devices do not allow manual IP settings.
If you’re someone who wants to change DNS settings in the router settings then you’re likely savvy enough to use your own router.
It would be nice if ISPs could do something with their janky DNS servers though. On several occasions I’ve had a customer site/service down escalated to me and it has been difficult to explain that no, there’s not an issue our end, it’s down for millions of people because a certain ISPs DNS servers are not picking up record changes even though the TTL has long expired and there’s nothing we can do about it.
It was definitely DNS, and definitely with sky
I’m a Infrastructure Architect with a NHS Trust, Sky couldn’t resolve any NHS DNS domains, regardless if those domains linked to central NHS resources (e.g. HSCN/secure boundary) or individual trusts own hosted resources, we had several dozen staff working from home that lost Secure remote access, ALL of them with Sky.
Not entirely Sky’s fault. From what I have seen, the NHS was dropping DNS queries originating from Sky DNS infrastructure.
Intervention from the NHS on their platform lead to the resolution of this issue.
It wasn’t a unique to Sky problem. Some other ISP’s saw it as well, including Vodafone.
I was involved in troubleshooting this for a customer that uses Vodafone, and while I can’t be sure, I’d say this was overly aggressive denial of service mitigation. If I sent a few hundred DNS queries to the NHS quickly they stopped talking to me.
I imagine this problem impacted Sky specifically because they are popular and were triggering that DoS protection. Less popular ISP’s, or those with more distributed DNS resolver platforms (like 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) didn’t.
AI driven network engineers in action. Deploy, don’t verify.
There isn’t a UK NHS website or app. Do you actually mean NHS England??
http://www.nhs.uk
Trt it.