Unable to login to your DeskAway account incident
“Message from Sahil Parikh, Founder”
Earlier today (IST) users were unable to login to their DeskAway account. Since it was past midnight here, we only got to the problem on Saturday morning around 10:00 am IST when our staff resumed office. Initially, we thought it was a high load issue (due to a possible log rotation), but after going through a series of tests, we realized that the reason people could not login was because of an issue with the database that enables logins/ authentication. We fixed that and everything seemed to work again. Though, users were still seeing an error message while logging in, which was due to a caching issue on the browser. Once the browser cache was removed and the login page reloaded, the login process worked.
Our server was functioning fine and there was no downtime. Hence, we were not alerted by SMS or email when this issue happened. We are very prompt with customer service almost 16 hours in the day (except for times when its night time here) but with this incident we will be putting in a process to fill in the gap in the coming weeks.
Things do go wrong online but we should have communicated this incident clearly to everyone. I sincerely apologize to everyone who were waiting on a response from us.
This issue has been fixed and we have got confirmation from a lot of you’ll that you can now login to your accounts. Our team will be monitoring everything this week (including Sunday) to make sure things run smooth.
Regards,
Sahil
August 29th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
DA Blog: Unable to login to your DeskAway account incident http://tinyurl.com/nx88em
August 30th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
We have customers in the US who are working when it is 10PM here (in India). If DA crashes during nighttime, these customers will not have access and we will lose them.
For everyone’s sake, please put a system in place for monitoring and repairing your server at night. You could have a bot logging in and accessing a file every 15 minutes, and on a failure it could call or email your maintenance staff.
Best,
Lucky
September 1st, 2009 at 1:45 am
Thank you for your comments, Lucky. We are looking into several options currently. We already have port monitoring by our hosting provider as well as Pingdom. Since, this was application-specific we were not alerted. The bot idea is something that we will implement.
Regards,
Sahil