Some technical woes and some humble pie

So I’ll be the first to admit that the last week hasn’t been our greatest.

Firstly and most sincerely: as a team we are sorry for the inconvenience in the last week. We pride ourselves on our devotion to customer service and we feel we’ve fallen short.

I want to take a little time to go over – in non-technical detail – the two separate issues we experienced this week that caused so much disruption to you our customers.

The issue that caused problems on Monday to Wednesday was related to our ageing LDAP server. This is the part of the site software that manages the log-in elements. It became overloaded and caused us downtime on three successive days. We have put plans in place to mitigate some of these issues and are still working on it. Full report to follow.

The separate issue that caused us downtime over the weekend was related to a domain name record – please bear with us on this as we’re still investigating the root cause. The problem wasn’t related to the core site software but rather the domain name record that points the planningportal.gov.uk URL at our servers.

We had some difficulty getting technical support from the third-party supplier which manages this service.

For the record this was not IBM, our current technical supplier, who worked tirelessly to help our own technical team resolve the issue. Our thanks.

The site URL issue was resolved early Sunday evening.

Once again: we are very sorry for the disruption and the inconvenience this caused.

We will shortly be re-launching the Planning Portal on a new infrastructure and can look forward to  greater stability and scalability.

We are truly excited about what’s coming in the months ahead and hope you’ll keep the faith.