The last 24 hours have been painful to say the least. Painful for our engineers who have been working around the clock to resolve the issue, but even more painful for our customers who have been unable use their accounts.
You will get no excuses from me. We have let you down and I take full responsibility for what happened. It is never acceptable for our customers to ever be without access to their funds — period.
Whilst I’m delighted to announce that the issue has since been resolved, I am very aware that we must enhance our technical efforts to ensure that nothing like this can happen again.
So, what actually happened?
At around 07:00 BST on Friday morning, our transaction database began to malfunction. Naturally, we followed procedure and switched to a backup server. Unfortunately, the backup server began to drastically slow down and was struggling to process live transactions.
To make matters worse, we had an unexpected spike of 50% in user activity on Friday and the backup server could not handle such a large increase in volume. This server slowdown has never happened before. As a result of this, around 25% of transactions began timing out, occasionally increasing to 75%.
At around 20:30 BST on Friday evening, our engineers were finally able to identify the issue — it was not our application or our database, but instead a server failure. We decided to perform an emergency migration to a newly prepared server.
I would like to reassure you that all personal data and customer funds were completely secure at all times.
Has the issue now been resolved?
This emergency migration process took around 20 minutes and since the move to a new server, our systems have been operating successfully and all services have been fully restored.
Why have I still not heard back from support?
Our in-app support chat continued to operate as normal throughout the incident, as we host this on a separate server. As I’m sure you can imagine, our support agents have been overwhelmed by the number of tickets raised since Friday morning. However, we have now enhanced our support efforts and increased the number of live agents, so you can expect to hear back from our team shortly.
Our promise to you
If you were forced to use an alternative payment method and therefore incurred fees, we will fully reimburse you for this amount. Please contact a member of support via in-app chat or social media to submit an application.
Regrettably, we have learnt a great deal from this experience and we are actively working on implementing a number of processes to ensure that our backup servers will be able to handle increased volumes moving forward. I am committed to improving our technical infrastructure and expanding our team — we are determined to get this right.
I truly believe in the opportunity that we have to change the way our customers spend their money around the world, but we can’t achieve this without your continued support.