Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002
FOI Reference: FOI/202500479821
Date received: 8 August 2025
Date responded: 5 September 2025
Information requested
Request for information 1:
In the last 12 months has Social Security Scotland had any problems with operations concerning;
Request for information 1: Inbound calls not answered due to technical failures, excessive waiting times. Calls dropped as too many people in the queue to be answered.
Request for information 2: Online chat being down through technical failure or too many people in waiting in the chat queue.
Request for information 3: Online portal information submissions.
Response
While we have no formal records of additional system outages beyond those documented below, it is possible that there may have been brief, intermittent disruptions that were not captured through standard monitoring or reporting mechanisms. These shorter blips, if they occurred, would likely have resolved quickly and may not have triggered alerts or formal incident logging.
Request for information 1:
There have been three occasions within the last 12 months where there has been an unexpected technical issue with the phone system leading to downtime. Our provider is under contractual obligation to resolve such issues within four hours. It is not possible to calculate how many calls were dropped during these periods as this information is not recorded during downtime.
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested. This is because there is no upper limit set for to the amount of calls in a queue and, as such, zero calls were dropped as a result of too many people waiting in a queue or excessive waiting time.
This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested.
Request for information 2:
There have been three occasions within the last 12 months where there has been an unexpected webchat technical issue leading to downtime.
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested. This is because there have been zero instances of webchat system downtime caused by there being too many clients waiting in queue. Once our webchat queue system is full it does not record how many people are waiting, over and above those already in the queue.
This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that Social Security Scotland does not have some of the information you have requested.
You may also be interested in the information within our regularly published statistics relating to telephony and webchat: Social Security Scotland - Telephony and Webchat management information to March 2025
Request for information 3:
There have been four occasions within the last 12 months where there has been an unexpected technical issue with portal submissions which led to downtime.
Upon successful application submission, clients are shown an onscreen message confirming that the submission was successful and given the opportunity to save a PDF (Portable Document Format) version of their completed application. We have internal processes to check that the application is received into our internal application processing system and if there are any issues or errors, we will take steps to resolve these to ensure that the application is received.
In the event that an application submission is not successful in Digital Portal, the client will not see the onscreen confirmation and their application will be saved within Digital Portal for the client to return and attempt submission again.
About FOI
Social Security Scotland is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. The Scottish Government also publishes responses to requests. You can view the responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.