Good evening parents/carers.

We realise that the postponement of yesterday’s S3 Parents’ Evening was hugely disruptive and disappointing to those of you who were to be in attendance.

As stated, in a post on this site, minutes after the planned start of the event, this was not caused by any fault of the school or its staff; rather it was a technical issue well beyond our control which lay with the systems used by our Parents Booking supplier, Netmedia. Their Director, Will Mackenzie, wrote this statement to us today on the issues faced:

Hello,

Can I start with a huge apology? Sorry for last night. We really, really mean that. We’re so sorry we let you down.

Quick explanation: Last night we had total server outage from 5.05pm to 6.05pm-ish, and are still investigating why and exactly how much of this was out fault, and why. On two previous occasions where we’ve had similar outage (more than a year ago, back at the beginning of video meetings) it was to do with the ‘load’ on the servers being over what we had ever seen before, but last night was not like that and I believe we had the correct amount of server resource, so we are actually still investigating. The developers are looking through our logs, reading errors and trying to recreate and simulate the issue we had.

However, we were not the only service affected. Twilio, our video meeting supplier’s technology was also down for even longer than ours, past 7pm, and, again, I’m waiting for them to tell us why – although they have been in touch to apologise. Had we not had downtime, video meetings still would not have been able to go ahead – so whether that’s a coincidence or not we’ll find out soon. I’m hoping that they’ll have some news soon. 

I’m sorry I don’t have an update yet on the exact ‘why’ this happened yet, but hope to later – the team are working hard on this. It’s very complicated pulling logs apart and running simulations. With the website being down we couldn’t even get a message up to explain – and all our focus was on restoring the service. Obviously whatever we find to be of our fault will be fixed immediately, especially because we have more than double the number of parents’ evenings we had last night on Thursday and a similar number tonight (Wednesday) and understand that reliability is paramount.

Once more, I am so, so sorry for the trouble caused and eager to restore trust. We expect everything to be perfect tonight but are still testing and investigating exactly what caused this, as I say.

Sorry once again,

Best wishes

Will Mackenzie, Director, Netmedia.

PLEASE NOTE:

We have taken the decision to reschedule the S3 Parents’ Evening for Tuesday 8th March, beginning at 5.30pm. All existing appointments will be moved to this new date; there is no need for parents/carers to re-book appointments. If you have any questions or problems, please contact us.