It was not our best week.
Here’s what happened.
Dear WordFly Subscribers,
We want to provide a transparent review of the delivery issues some of you experienced last week while using WordFly. Services returned to normal on Thursday around 1:30 PM PST.
First, let us say we are sorry. We know that timely email marketing is critical to your business success, especially in the ticketing market we serve. This disruption affected ticket sales, revenue, and engagement. We know we didn’t live up to your standards or ours. We have learned valuable lessons from this experience. We’d like to take a moment to explain what happened and what we’re doing to prevent it from happening again.
What Happened
There were software and hardware configuration failures that caused email sending through our mail application to dramatically slow down. When we first noticed the issue, we ran through our normal security and reliability protocols multiple times, but nothing came back with a positive result. After investigating all weekend and into the week, our DevOps team discovered the issue. It then took additional time to update, test, and monitor the revised software configuration to ensure it could properly manage the higher sending volumes we are now seeing routinely on WordFly. This whole process took much longer than we wanted, but we wanted a solution that we knew was reliable.
Changes We’re Making
While we do have robust and thoughtful reliability policies in place, we now know there were holes in our approach to both discovering the issue and successfully communicating with our customers on our progress. Here are the changes we’re making:
- Performed a ground-up review and revision of our product monitoring and troubleshooting response protocols. Made updates as needed.
- Updated much of our backend software and some key hardware elements to provide a more robust infrastructure, especially for high volume senders.
- Modifying our communication policies and messaging so that our customers have a better understanding of the severity of the problems and when to expect a resolution.
Thank you for being patient and understanding with us. We know this was hard and we hope this message is a step toward restoring your trust in us. We do our very best to provide a reliable, easy to use, and valuable product. Issues like this are part of life in the software world, but we’re determined to make them few and far between.
It’s been helpful to hear your feedback over the past week and we are still listening. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, if you have ideas about how we could have done better.
Sincerely,
The WordFly Team
support@wordfly.com
