Brandkit May 15th 2019 Outage Report

Last week on May 15th Brandkit was down for 95 mins - which is not a good thing at any time.

It happened to coincide with New Zealand's largest Tourism Conference, TRENZ 2019, where many of our New Zealand Tourism and Destination Marketing customers were exhibiting and demonstrating their image libraries to their customers - mainly travel buyers from offshore.

Lessons learned

This whole episode should not have happened and it was my fault.

My assumptions about Heroku's process were plain wrong and I am guilty of not paying enough attention. That said Heroku's communications could have been clearer.

Once we were aware of the issue we could/should have resolved it in 5 minutes, except for Westpac's block and subsequent, on-hold process.

1. Don't assume online providers will charge your card for invoices that previously had declined transactions when you update CC details. 

Beyond our control

While we take full responsibility for this outage, our suppliers could make changes to help avoid these situations, and help us respond faster in the future.