Between Wednesday, April 10th, and Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024, due to issues with our bulk and single email endpoints, there were periodic disruptions to service for some customers which resulted in their emails being delayed.
Specifically, emails were processed by our servers and sent with a delay of between 10 minutes and 1 hour. The delivery speed of any Email Service Provider is not entirely up to them as many factors come into play, such as the Internet Service Providers’ (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) server loads. But for this instance, the responsibility lies with us, as emails were received normally by the inboxes.
This resulted in downtime, and for the first time, we did not meet our SLA during this last period of 30 days.
We are committed to a 99.5% SLA. While we regularly achieve 100% uptime, during the last month our service level was 98.7% as our Sending Email API was down for a total of 9 hours and 21 minutes instead of the committed maximum of 3 hours and 17 minutes.
The events took place on:
April 10th, 2024 between the hours of 12:50 UTC and 15:12 UTC
April 11th, 2024 between the hours of 11:24 UTC and 12:16 UTC
April 15th, 2024 between the hours of 16:00 UTC and 18:07 UTC
April 23rd, 2024 between the hours of 08:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC
Having our SLA in place allows us to recognize issues while having concrete definitions of acceptable and unacceptable service for our customers that enable us to take steps to rectify service disruptions and provide compensation when it’s due. During this incident, the entirety of our team was dedicated to solving the problem and keeping our customers aware of the situation and its consequences.
While our downtime was extended by a minimal amount beyond our SLA, we understand that any loss of email performance has a knock-on effect on businesses. If you think you’ve been affected by the downtime, please read our Service Level Agreement, in particular sections 4, 5 and 6, and contact us with the required information.
After processing each claim, we’ll issue a service credit provided there is proof the account was affected by the downtime. We will get back to you within a week of the claim submission.
What we’re doing to prevent this from happening again
The MailerSend team reacted quickly to these events to get sending back on track and provide support and updates on the situation. As a result we:
Updated our backbone service that delivers emails to our clients
Are implementing procedures to better track and handle email delivery problems
Are making continuous improvements to our codebase to handle bigger email loads
Check the system status and subscribe to updates
You can easily check the system status and view any downtime within the last 90 days and beyond on our MailerSend Status page. Click Subscribe to updates to be notified of any incidents via email, SMS, Slack, or Atom/RSS feed.
You can also use the maintenance.start and maintenance.finish webhook events to receive system updates in your app or other tools.
