Incident Report

[Gary]

At approx 10:48am an external service provider suffered a serious technical problem which resulted in our website being taken offline.

We worked with the service problem continuously and were in contact with them every 15 mins for updates where we had been assured that the problem was close to being rectified.

At approx 2.30pm the management took the decision that we could no longer rely on the service providers updates and decided to initiate our disaster recovery plan. This involves publishing basic contact details on our holding page and deploying new servers at a backup hosting facility and running the site in read only mode from our latest set of backups.

At 3.30pm we were able to publish a full list of advertiser contact details on our holding page so that customers could begin to receive calls from their adverts.

At 4.30pm we were able to deploy the site having full read functionality so that all adverts would be displayed and customers would be able to access the advertisements. We disabled logins, payment and any functionality that interacted with the databases.

At 8.30pm our external service provider signalled that they had resolved the issue and we began testing our infrastructure to see if the provider remained stable.

At 9.40pm we resumed full service on our main platform with no outstanding problems.

Whilst this was a totally unprecedented outage in which we had absolutely no control over it; we take full responsibility for our infrastructure and our ability to deliver our service.

We will be discussing this matter in private with our advertisers and will make no further public comments about the matter.

Yours Sincerely

Gary
General Manager