I recently went through the online incorporation process and encountered a persistent "Service Unavailable" error when entering my co-founder's residential address. I tried five times over several hours with no success. The Companies House status page showed everything as normal, with no warning anywhere in the application journey that this feature was broken.With no other option to progress, I used an office address as a placeholder — fully intending to correct it on approval. The next day my application was rejected for using a non-residential address.When I called Companies House, the agent confirmed they were already aware of the bug. Yet there was no warning shown to users, and no reasonable fix was offered. The two options I was given were: pay 25% more to apply by post (over a four-day Easter bank holiday weekend), or incorporate without my co-founder and add them later – a messy workaround for something that was entirely their system's fault.About 30 minutes after the call, I tried again and it worked – the bug had been silently fixed. The agent had no knowledge of this.The core issue isn't just the bug – it's that a critical, known failure had no user-facing notice, and the resolution offered was entirely unreasonable. For a government service that founders depend on for something as important as company formation, this is simply not good enough.I have filed a formal complaint and hope this review helps other founders know what to watch out for.
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