Page 1832 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 June 2021
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Thursday afternoon to pause the website for maintenance until 7 am last Friday, 11 June.
The developer team carried out further work to improve the site’s performance and hoped this would resolve all issues. After working Thursday afternoon and evening on the system it became clear we required more time to investigate the issues. Out of an abundance of caution and so as to not cause further disruption and uncertainty, we made the decision take the system offline for at least seven days to further investigate the issues. This was a difficult decision. However, we made the decision because it was simply not fair on businesses to have to deal with the ongoing uncertainty of the website. We wanted businesses to be having an easy, straightforward experience with their dashboards and not having to manage customers and their own frustrations with the system.
I apologise for the inconvenience in having to take the system offline. I know this was frustrating in and of itself, but doing so gave us the time to diagnose and address the issues and to restore confidence in the system. It also meant we were providing certainty to businesses about when we would be back, and we continued to keep them informed during the time we were offline so that they too could plan.
We also understood that many businesses had manually accepted vouchers with the intention of processing them through the dashboard when the website was back online. We committed to honour those transactions and have been manually processing them ourselves. This work is still continuing with an expectation that it will be finalised this week so the reimbursements can be made to businesses in a timely way.
I want to thank businesses for their incredible patience and generosity while we took the scheme offline. They had every right to be disappointed and concerned, but they overwhelmingly stuck with it. There were erroneous reports in the media that many businesses had withdrawn. This is not correct, and it was unfortunate to see it perpetuated across several outlets with no basis. Six businesses of 767 withdrew. We regret but respect that they did. However, of those six, three returned to the program when the website was back online again. Again, I personally express my thanks to all businesses for their patience and for sticking with the program.
Once we took the system offline, the developer team were able to fully analyse the situation, and it became clear that the issue related to the architecture of the system and how the application logic was communicating with the database. Analysis of the system performing under load in a simulated environment identified the areas where the application logic was causing performance issues.
The system enabled customers to register and access vouchers and for businesses to redeem vouchers. The large volume of users trying to register and redeem vouchers at the same time caused the system to slow and eventually crash as the querying process could not keep up with the volume of transactions in the system during peak periods last week.
Both of these activities require constant querying across an ever-growing database. The technical issues were determined to be performance issues caused by the way the
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