HMRC took every telephone helpline offline on Wednesday afternoon after what officials described as a failure in the “telephony interface”. Callers heard a recorded message stating the lines were “temporarily unavailable” and were directed to use online services instead. The problem affected all inbound numbers except a single fraud-response line.

Deputy chief executive, Angela MacDonald, told MPs on the Commons Treasury Committee that engineers were “working round the clock” and service would resume by Thursday morning. From 8 am today (Thursday), the helplines began accepting calls again, but a new message warns of minimum 20-minute waits and encourages the use of the HMRC app.

HMRC confirmed that only its dedicated breach-assistance line remained open throughout the shutdown. That number serves the estimated 100,000 PAYE taxpayers whose personal tax accounts were locked after last year’s £47 million phishing attack, details of which were revealed to the committee on Wednesday; business customers are not affected.

The outage has reignited concern over HMRC customer service standards. A Public Accounts Committee report published in January found the department answered just 66.4% of calls in 2023/24 and kept callers waiting an average of more than 23 minutes, well short of its 85% target.

HMRC has not yet explained the root cause of the failure or indicated whether any compensation or service-level changes will follow.

John-Paul Marks, HMRC chief executive, told MPs:

“HMRC phone lines were down on Wednesday afternoon but will be ‘back up and available’ on Thursday.” 

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