Hero App - Notice history

Incident summary

Earlier today, an internal system responsible for processing appointment availability became overloaded and stopped responding, which temporarily interrupted availability updates across the platform. Service has now been fully restored and is operating normally. Below is a summary of what happened, the impact, and the steps we've taken.

Timeline

Impact

While the system was affected, availability could not be processed, so slot information across the platform was not refreshed during the incident. In practice this meant that newly opened, changed, or filled slots may not have been surfacing, so availability views and booking outcomes could have been out of date for the affected period. Some booking attempts may have failed or needed to be retried while the system was unavailable.

The disruption was limited to availability processing. No patient or practice data was lost, and the rest of the platform remained accessible throughout. Once service was restored, all outstanding work was processed and slot information returned to an accurate, up-to-date state.

What caused it

We recently made a change to how the platform retrieves availability from connected systems. This change increased the everyday, background level of load on the underlying system that processes availability. Under normal daytime conditions this remained within safe limits, but it reduced the spare capacity available to absorb busier periods.

When the busiest period of the day arrived, the combination of this raised background load and the normal peak in demand exceeded what the system could handle at once. It reached full capacity and stopped responding, which halted availability processing until we intervened. The issue was the result of this specific change to how availability is retrieved, rather than a wider or ongoing limitation of the platform, which is why the preventive steps below focus on reducing that background load and giving ourselves earlier warning in future.

Corrective and preventive actions

Earlier this morning, an internal system responsible for processing appointment availability became unresponsive, which temporarily interrupted availability updates across the platform. Service has now been fully restored and is operating normally.

Impact

Between approximately 09:15 and 11:00, availability could not be processed, which meant slot information was not refreshed during this period. Some bookings and availability views may not have reflected the most up-to-date position or rendered availability while the system was affected. Performance was then degraded while the system caught up on queued work between 11:00 and 11:45, after which normal service resumed.

What caused it

A new process that continuously retrieves appointment availability had gradually raised the baseline load on the underlying system. This left insufficient capacity to absorb the usual morning peak in demand, and the combination of the two caused the system to reach capacity and stop responding.

How we resolved it

We restored the affected system, then paused new availability processing to allow it to stabilise. Once the queued work had cleared and the system was quiet, we resumed availability processing and confirmed it was operating normally.

The service has been restored and the platform is operating normally again. The disruption lasted approximately 1 1/2 hours. Some recently submitted updates may take a little longer than usual to appear as our systems work through a short backlog, which we expect to clear over the coming period. We're continuing to monitor closely and will confirm once everything is fully resolved. Thank you for your patience during the disruption.

We've implemented a fix and are currently monitoring the result. Our service will start to return to regular performance levels.

We've identified an issue with an internal service that manages availability retrieval, which affected the performance and slot availability of the platform. Our team is working to restore normal service as soon as possible.

Earlier today the Hero platform experienced some disruption. This was caused by two separate and unrelated issues that happened to occur within the same period,
rather than a single underlying fault.

The first affected the app itself, which for a time was running slowly and at times was unavailable. This was caused by a number of database queries that were not performing efficiently. We have since optimised them and performance has returned to normal.

The second affected partners connecting to Hero through our API, where some requests were incorrectly rejected as unauthorised. This followed a system update that was released without a dependent component. That component has since been deployed and API access has been fully restored.

Both issues are now resolved and we are continuing to monitor closely to confirm the platform remains stable.

We have implemented a fix and are currently monitoring the result.

Monitoring - A fix was put in place promoting a new instance around 11:30. Messages look to be flowing again. The team will continue to monitor before closing the incident. If still having any issues do let us know.
Aug 19, 2026 - 12:11 BST

From Firetext: Progress is still slow but approaching 50%, the team continue to evaluate all available options. Next update by 12pm.