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Your GP's website vanished overnight. Here is how to order your prescription anyway

Qurexa Editorial Team1 November 20266 min read 0 0
Your GP's website vanished overnight. Here is how to order your prescription anyway

What happened

Hundreds of GP surgeries across England and Wales suddenly lost their websites and online services in late October 2026. The cause was not a cyber attack. It was a company going bust. The firm was Silicon Practice. It built and ran websites for GP practices, along with the online forms many of us now use to describe a problem to our surgery without ringing up. It went into administration, and the services it hosted started going dark. The scale is large. Reports say around 500 practices in England were affected. That is just under one in ten of all practices in the country. Some surgeries in Wales were hit too. Practices in Gloucestershire, London and Norfolk were among those named in reports, along with parts of Wales. For some, the whole website disappeared. For others, it was the online consultation form or the chatbot that stopped working. One example given in reports was Rowcroft Medical Centre in Stroud, whose website went down. NHS England contacted affected practices with advice on keeping services running. Patients who could not get through online were told to do the old-fashioned thing: phone reception, or walk in.

Why this matters

A practice website is no longer just a noticeboard. For a lot of people it is the front door. The Royal College of GPs made this point when the story broke. Practice websites are increasingly how patients get care and book appointments, and the College said affected practices needed prompt support from NHS England and local NHS bodies. Think about what sits behind that front door. Ordering a repeat prescription. Asking for a sick note. Describing a rash or a cough through an online form so a clinician can decide how urgent it is. Checking the opening hours before a bank holiday. When that door shuts, the work does not vanish. It moves to the phone line. And the phone line was already the part of general practice people complain about most. There is a particular worry for anyone on regular medication. If you order your repeat tablets through a website that no longer exists, and you do not notice until you are down to your last two days, that is a real gap in treatment, not just an inconvenience.

What the evidence actually says

It is worth being careful about what is known here, and what is not. What is well reported and consistent across sources: Silicon Practice went into administration in late October 2026; roughly 500 English practices were affected, just under 10% of the total; Welsh practices were also affected; and NHS England issued continuity advice to practices. What is not clear from the reporting: exactly why the company failed, and exactly when every service will be fully restored. Some surgeries had already moved to new web providers to get essential information back online. Others had not. It is also important to say what this is not. There is no suggestion in any of the reporting that patient medical records were lost or exposed. Your medical record does not live on your surgery's website. It sits in a separate clinical system. What went down was the shop window and the online form, not the filing cabinet. That distinction matters, because 'GP services collapse' headlines can sound like a data breach when they are not one. If you are worried about your own records, the honest answer is that this particular event is not a reason to be.

Qurexa perspective

We deliver prescriptions, so we see the knock-on effect of this kind of outage quite directly. When an online ordering route disappears, the people who feel it first are usually those on several regular medicines, often older patients, often people who find a long phone queue genuinely hard. The medicine itself is fine. The route to asking for it is what broke. A practical point from experience: the single most useful thing you can do is build in a buffer. If you order your repeat when you have seven to ten days left rather than two, almost any outage, postal delay or staffing problem becomes a non-event. People who already do this barely noticed last week. We would rather say that plainly than suggest a delivery service is the answer to a website going offline. It is not. Ordering earlier is.

Practical advice

If your surgery's website is down or your usual online form has stopped working, here is what actually helps. Check your repeat medication first. Count how many days you have left. If it is under a week, sort it today rather than waiting for the website to come back. Use the NHS App. This is the big one. The NHS App is run centrally by the NHS, not by your surgery's web provider, so it was not affected by this collapse. Many practices let you order repeat prescriptions and see your record through it. If you have never set it up, this is a good week to do it. Ring reception, and ring early. Mid-morning and just after lunch are usually the worst times. First thing or late afternoon is often quicker. Ask your pharmacy. A community pharmacist can often tell you whether a prescription has already been sent electronically, which saves you chasing the surgery at all. Under Pharmacy First, they can also deal with a number of common conditions without you needing the GP. Do not assume silence means it is handled. If you submitted an online form just before the outage, it may never have arrived. Follow it up. For anything urgent, use NHS 111, and 999 for an emergency. A broken website changes nothing about those routes.

What to know

A company called Silicon Practice went into administration in late October 2026, taking down websites and online consultation forms for around 500 GP practices in England, just under one in ten, plus some in Wales. NHS England has given practices continuity advice. Patients are being pointed to the phone and to in-person visits while services are restored. Your medical records are not affected. The NHS App is a separate, central service and still works. If you take regular medication, check how many days you have left and order early from now on. Sources: BBC News (via Yahoo News), 'Hundreds of GP practices lose online services after collapse of tech firm Silicon Practice', 29 October 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/hundreds-gp-practices-lose-online-172208235.html; Doctors.net.uk, 'Hundreds of GP practices hit by collapse of online services provider', October 2026, https://www.doctors.net.uk/news/hundreds-of-gp-practices-hit-by-collapse-of-online-services-provider; Newbury Today, 'GP surgeries lose online services and websites after collapse of tech firm Silicon Practice', October 2026, https://www.newburytoday.co.uk/news/gps-rush-to-restore-online-services-after-tech-firm-s-collap-9489263/ This article is for general information and does not replace advice from a doctor, pharmacist or other qualified healthcare professional.

#GP services#online consultations#repeat prescriptions#NHS England#primary care#patient access

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