Innovate UK Funding Service offline from 4pm Friday 2 October to 10am Monday 5 October 2026: save and submit first

Innovate UK Funding Service offline from 4pm Friday 2 October to 10am Monday 5 October 2026: save and submit first

1 October 2026 — Innovate UK's Innovation Funding Service, the website through which businesses apply for its grants and loans, will be unavailable for essential maintenance from 4:00pm on Friday 2 October 2026 until 10:00am on Monday 5 October 2026. The notice on the service asks applicants to save their work and complete any tasks before the maintenance begins.

Not yet independently verified. The maintenance notice carries no publication date; it was read on the service on 1 October 2026. No independent report was found. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Why it matters

A weekend outage costs a working Friday afternoon and Monday morning, when most applicants and their finance teams work on bids. Anyone with an application in progress, a partner waiting to accept an invitation, or project-setup tasks after an award should finish them by Friday lunchtime. The notice does not mention moving any competition deadline, so do not count on one.

Calls open now that SMEs are working on

The competition list read on 1 October showed, among others:

• Frontier AI: SME Champions, Phase 1 — opened on 1 October 2026 and closes on 11 November 2026. UK-registered micro, small and medium-sized enterprises can apply alone for a share of up to £3.1 million for feasibility studies in frontier AI and machine-learning technologies "with a clear route to defensible scale-up". Our earlier item on the Frontier AI SME Champions and controllable-AI grants has the background.
• Engineering Biology Investor Partnerships, Round 1 — up to £8 million for UK SMEs working with selected investor partners; applicants must be seeking private financing of at least twice the grant.
• UK-Germany Bilateral Collaborative R&D, Round 5 — up to £2.4 million for UK SMEs working with at least one German SME applying under Germany's ZIM programme; closes 1 December 2026 (see our earlier item).
• Innovation Loans expression of interest — for UK micro, small and medium-sized businesses.

Each competition page gives its own closing time; check it rather than assuming midnight.

What to do

• Save and back up every application in progress before 4pm on Friday 2 October, including copies of the answers held outside the service.
• Send partner invitations now so collaborators can accept them before the outage.
• Avoid planning submission for Monday 5 October: the service returns only at 10am.
• SMEs working on AI: put the 11 November close of Frontier AI SME Champions Phase 1 in the calendar and read the competition brief on the service.

Sources

• Innovate UK Innovation Funding Service: competition search page and maintenance notice — 1 October 2026