Dear Subscriber,
Our records indicate you were likely unable to access our service on Thursday, February 6, 2014 for some period of time. We had a problem with our entitlement system that controls access to our servers. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue and wanted to explain what occurred that day.
As a part of our routine entitlement system maintenance, a legacy entitlement bit was removed from the table. This removal triggered a bug in the updating of the user record database from our Customer Management System and resulted in the deletion of thousands of valid usernames. This prevented a subset of our customers from accessing our platform. Once we identified the problem, we started reconciling the issue both systematically and manually. By noon Pacific Time, all of our customers were back on-line.
Although this was a highly uncommon event, we take it very seriously and want to assure you that we have taken preventative measures to ensure that this does not happen again. Service reliability is critical in our business and we accept that responsibility with the highest priority.
We also recognize that it was very difficult to get a hold of Customer Support that day due to the large influx of customer queries. We are reviewing our capabilities around handling large spikes of calls and how we can improve our customer notification options. In the meantime, please continue to utilize our Forum for the latest information on our products and services.
Again, please accept our apologies for any disruption this event caused. We sincerely appreciate your continued business.
Respectfully,
Kyle Ford
General Manager, Desktops
Interactive Data Corporation