NHS email access is getting back on its feet today after a nasty sick day yesterday.

We had several emails from readers unable to send mail to people with nhs.uk email addresses yesterday.

A Department of Health spokesperson said today:

We can confirm that yesterday mail delivered via the Relay service linking all NHS.UK services was slower than expected.

The issue was immediately investigated and action taken by the supplier of this service, Cable and Wireless, to overcome the high processing load experienced by a number of Relay Mail Transfer Agents.

The affected service is separate to NHSMail which does not use Relay, and only two per cent of the daily mail volumes were briefly delayed. The resulting backlog of email traffic is being cleared and all standard email messages going through the service have now been delivered. We are continuing to monitor the service to ensure queuing levels are kept to a minimum and email traffic to external NHS UK accounts is delivered satisfactorily.

The Health Service is also having problems with its online prescription service. An error message here promises a fix later today. ®

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