We had an unexpected outage on 31st January. Here’s a word from our CTO, Guy Duncan to explain what happened
What went wrong?
Shortly after 10am on 31 January we were alerted to a problem with our credit service. The issue then spread to other parts of the mobile and web app; resulting in login for our members becoming inaccessible. Our tech team addressed the issues in line with our standard process, but in this instance the problem could not be resolved. We were able to restore occasional access but the full user experience was not to our standards.
Our team investigated the potential causes and discovered a 30% increase in customer traffic to the Tide app. We understand this was likely due to the end of the month demands such as payroll runs and the deadline for submitting tax returns.
Impact on our Members
Access to the Tide app
| Android | No access in general or very poor performance. |
| iOS | No access in general or very poor performance. |
| Web | No access in general or very poor performance. |
Payments
Scheduled payments were not affected, we can confirm that everything went out on time.
Card Transactions
No impact, these are all serviced separately by our banking partner PPS, who were unaffected by the issues affecting Tide.
How was service restored?
To address this, and return our platform to normal service we have built additional servers. We now have triple the number of servers in place to support our platform. This upscaling of our internal infrastructure now allows our system to handle a higher demand in the number of members. This will ensure that the app runs at the performance levels you’ve come to expect.
Please note our credit services and support functions are not at full capacity. All remaining services are working fine, but please bear with us while we work towards 100% restoration of all services.
What we are doing to prevent this happening again
Our priority now is to complete work on our technology infrastructure that’s currently underway, which will allow us to permanently auto-scale for our growing demand.
We’re sorry this has happened. Everything we do is focused on making life easier for small businesses, so it’s disappointing to have not met those standards today. Our team are continually working on improving our platform and putting preventative measures in place to avoid this in the future.