Companies House Downtime June 2026
On Wednesday 10th June, Companies House were scheduled to do some work on their internal systems. The work was planned to be completed by midnight. We usually get data from their systems around 4am but on the Thursday morning, that time came and went. We got in touch in the morning and had it explained that they hoped it would be up later that day but Wednesday came and went, as did both Thursday and Friday, as did Saturday and Sunday although we never expected to get any files on those days anyway. Monday it was still down too. It sounds like it came up late on Tuesday (only a couple of dozen companies were formed on Tuesday) - nearly a week after going down for maintenance.
Companies House process usually somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 companies every day. Basically 5 days of being down could well have been 15,000 companies or more that had been submitted but not yet formed, along with countless change of director details, annual accounts, confirmation statements etc. We usually get 50,000+ record updates every day. Usually they don't process much at a weekend - unless they are running behind, and those great people at Companies House stood up to the plate and processed 5,500 on Wednesday, 5,800 on Thursday, 4,200 on Friday several thousand yesterday, around 1500 today (Sunday). 2 days prior to the issues, they did 2,700 and 2,900 so on Wednesday and Thursday they processed twice the number of companies they would usually, and with the additional companies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I would expect them to have caught up when we get Tuesday's data on Wednesday morning.
What was the problem that caused a week's worth of downtime? They haven't said. I believe there were system updates being done on the Wednesday which sounded like an internal process but the status updates during the week indicated they were working with their technology partners, to resolve the problem