Monday night, we published a change that caused some of our users to experience problems with JobTracker. Anyone using Internet Explorer 8 (or Internet Explorer 9 without a certain service pack) could log in but not much else. Most of the affected users were running Windows XP. If you were one of those affected, we’re very sorry.
I noticed we had a problem early Tuesday morning after receiving a few similar-sounding emails and calls. I woke up the developers (who are all on the West Coast), and they got right to work. It took them about 30 minutes to diagnose the issue and 30 more minutes to roll out a fix to all our users.
Before the fix was rolled out, a few more users started logging into the system and reporting the same issue. That got me thinking … it would be nice to have a status page that let our users know if we ever have any issues. Then everybody would know what was happening, even if you’d rather not contact support.
So we created just such a page at moraware.com/status. It’s not fancy – it’s just a page that lists any issues we ever experience, starting now.
There’s a permanent link to the new status page on our support page in case you need to find it. And if we ever experience an issue that takes more than a couple of minutes to fix, we’ll also put a prominent message on our home page telling you about it and linking to the status page for more detail.
We believe this will improve our ability to communicate during a crisis. This recent issue affected a fairly small percentage of our users – it would have been difficult to respond quickly if there were an issue that affected everyone. The new status page should help.
We also believe in transparency … it just makes sense to us to share an ongoing history of any issues our users might experience. Even with this recent issue, we’re quite proud of our track record of hosting reliable software, and we welcome the challenge of sharing the ongoing details, warts and all.
One more thing about this specific issue … it predominantly affected users on Windows XP. Microsoft is completely ending support for Windows XP in April, and it doesn’t make sense for us to support an operating system that Microsoft doesn’t support. So if you are on Windows XP, it’s time to upgrade. I’ll write more about this in another post soon.
Again, if you were affected by this issue, we’re very sorry – and we’re taking steps to make sure this particular issue never bites us again. Thanks for working with us.
