(April 17, 6:34PM) Today we experienced an unexpected outage on TimeWellScheduled service from 12:30pm to approximately 3:30pm.
Clients that were using TimeWellScheduled in Offline Mode continued to be able to punch in and out without any difficulties. To enable it for your business log in as administrator, choose Manage My Business – General Settings – and enable “Allow offline mode when internet goes down”.
Our Internet presence is hosted on Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. A routine server update and reboot caused the outage. Our team has determined the exact cause, and added maintenance procedures to check for similar events proactively in the future. For a little more detail, here’s some NerdSpeak: Although this does not happen often, every once in a while a reboot of an Amazon EC2 instance will cause a new IP address assignment, and in this case it was one of our domain controllers that was assigned a new IP address on reboot. If this does happen again in the future, our maintenance process will pick it up immediately and make necessary updates where required without causing any downtime.
As far as cloud service availability in general goes, keep in mind that your Internet Service Provider, or a major backbone could be affected with downtime. For this reason we strongly suggest that your Punch In/Out stations run in Offline Mode to allow for continuous business operations at your location.
Thank you for being our client!
