Outage for authentication traffic using TLS 1.0/1.1

Starting Monday 18 August 2025, the Care Identity Service (CIS) will begin a phased approach to blocking traffic to its CIS1 Authentication Service where deprecated TLS (1.0/1.1) is detected.

The phased blocking periods will be:

Monday 22 September from 8.30am to 9.30am
Wednesday 25 September from 8.00am to 10am
Monday 29 September from 8.00am to 10am
Wednesday 1 October from 8.00am to 10am

Deprecated TLS will be permanently blocked from use on Wednesday 15 October at 3pm.

Users of applications using CIS1 Authentication and CIS2 Authentication and unsupported version of Identity Agent may see a message warning them that their locally installed software is unsupported. The warning message will appear outside of the scheduled outages.

The warning message on CIS1 Authentication looks like the image below.

The warning message from CIS2 Authentication looks like the image below.

During the outages, users impacted by the outage will receive an error message and will be unable to authenticate. The error message looks like the image below.

The error message will read: "The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send."

What you need to do

If you see the warning or error message, please immediately get in touch with your local IT team to upgrade your software.

If you are a supplier supporting the NHS or responsible for IT at an NHS organisation and you are requested to support, you should arrange for users to upgrade to the latest version of Identity Agent.

If local IT teams need further support, they should contact the National Service Desk.