Mail service used by 30,000 businesses including NHS trusts suffers major outage

A person in a medical practice typing on a laptop.
(Image credit: Pixabay)

  • Around three in four UK medical practices use Docsign to share important letters
  • Docmail has been down for five days due to a server issue
  • Services can be resumed once the investigation completes

Docmail, a cloud-based mail service used by high-profile businesses and public-sector organizations, including some NHS trusts, continues to suffer a major outage after first being hit on September 2 2026.

The platform works by customers uploading their communications digitally, with Docmail handling printing and postage to recipients.

Parent company CFH says more than 75% of UK medical practices use its services for bulk and individual patient mail, spanning GPs, dentists, pharmacies, opticians and other private-sector firms.

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Docmail is still down

Now on its fifth day of interruptions, it means healthcare appointment letters, council correspondence and other important mail could be missed or delayed.

Docmail said customers were experiencing "slower than usual processing times" on September 2 before taking the service offline for "essential maintenance."

On September 4, the company told The Register: "We have been made aware of an issue impacting an isolated server, used by only one client." In other words, CFH purposely shut down the wider platform to investigate this incident, however the finer details of what went wrong are under wraps.

"This process does take time, and we are acting on the advice of external consultants to ensure we are taking the right precautions," a company spokesperson added.

According to CFH, Docmail itself is ready to be restored and made available, but external reviewers are still conducting the investigation.

The company's status page has not been updated since September 4 at the time of writing – at that time, it labelled the outage as an "unresolved incident."

"Work remains ongoing as a priority, and we will provide a further update as soon as we have more information to share," the company added.


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