Directions · VFS errors · 401

VFS error 401: Unauthorised

Your session is no longer authenticated. Like 403206, this is a sign-in problem rather than a restriction — sign in again and continue.

The short version

  • VFS showsSession expired (401)
  • What is restrictedThis browser session
  • How longImmediate.

Nothing is restricted. The browser session simply stopped being valid — the mildest of these errors, and the quickest to clear.

What it actually means

The site no longer recognises your session as signed in. It is the ordinary result of a session expiring, and carries no consequence for the account.

If it repeats immediately after every sign-in, the cause is usually browser storage — cookies blocked, or a privacy extension clearing them.

Why it happened

What to do

What makes it worse

Most of these codes are survivable. What turns a pause into a real problem is the reaction to it.

Codes people confuse this with

If the problem is that there are no appointments

Error codes aside, the usual reason people are on this page is that they have been refreshing the calendar for weeks. That is the thing these limits are reacting to, and it rarely works: on the routes we watch, an opening appears roughly once in several hundred checks, at no predictable hour.

We watch it instead, and book the moment one appears. You pay after the appointment is confirmed — if nothing opens, there is nothing to pay.

See the routes we cover