HM Land Registry says it is investigating the cause of an IT glitch that disrupted access to some of its core services yesterday.

Customers were informed yesterday morning of issues with the business e-services portal, business gateway, MapSearch, the search function on e-services for Local Land Charges, Find a property and the property alert. The issues have since been resolved.

The Gazette was told that Land Registry’s business e-services underwent some routine, scheduled maintenance overnight. ‘The maintenance team became aware of a resulting issue with access to the services, which was communicated to customers. This issue was corrected shortly after 11am,’ a spokesperson said.

When asked what the ‘resulting issue’ was, the spokesperson said Land Registry is analysing the outage with several suppliers and it is too early in the process to detail the exact cause.

There were also issues accessing data on requests for information (known as ‘requisitions’) on Land Registry’s Use land and property data service. Clicking on the link prompted a warning in relation to a certificate error. The spokesperson said the certificate warning was due to unrelated work to update the URL for the service and has since been corrected. ‘A limited number of users may have seen the message, but it bears no practical impact on the service, the data, or the security of the page,’ the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, conveyancers have been given more time to access their firm’s PDF downloads on the Land Registry portal. Documents for applications completed on or after 16 March are now freely available for 90 days after they were completed instead of 30. This includes completed registrations, and documents for guaranteed queries such as official copies and searches. The extended time also covers register, title plan and document views in the firm’s download area.