Service disruption last weekend
Posted By Julian Scarlett at 15/03/2010 09:15:28
First off, apologies for any of you who wanted to pay for anything or complete a form online over the weekend. We had contractors in to do some essential wiring work in our server room that should see an end to the recent electrical supply problems we've been having. As a result of that work two of our servers (those dealing with payments and forms) did not restart correctly and there was no-one in on Sunday to bring them back online.
This may raise the question of whether we should be providing true 24/7 support for our online services. I'm sure there are some of you who were affected by the downtime and who would advocate having support staff on call for just such an eventuality. However, given the low numbers of people potentially affected I think the Council can find other areas to spend its dwindling budgets more effectively. When online services become more heavily used and central to the way the public interacts with us we can think again about the level of support we can afford to provide for our maintaining web services outside business hours.
We do try our very best to minimise disruption to online services (our services availability figures show high levels of uptime) but in this case the work was essential and downtime unavoidable. Once again, I apologise for the fact that two key online functions were unavailable for longer than we had planned.
