Accounting software company Reckon has blamed a major infrastructure upgrade for causing intermittent access to Reckon Accounts Hosted on Monday and Tuesday this week.
The outage caused a lot of frustration among users in Reckon’s forums attempting to close off the previous month. Reckon sent customers an email from CEO Clive Rabie offering an explanation and apology for downtime.
“Reckon embarked on a necessary upgrade to the underlying infrastructure of the service last weekend. As a result of this process on Monday, 2 June 2014, some of you may have experienced difficulties accessing the Reckon Accounts Hosted service,” Rabie wrote.
“We’d like to apologise for the frustration that these difficulties with the service might have caused you,” he said.
The upgrade was carried out over the weekend to improve speed, performance and stability ahead of the busiest time of the year for the program. During the upgrade early on the morning of Monday 2 June, Reckon engineers detected an issue with the configuration of the servers’ storage that resulted in a number of users experiencing issues.
Problems included delayed logins, slow running for certain reports and logins failing to work on the first attempt. The company reported that all issues had been resolved by Tuesday evening.
The full text of the message is below.
Reckon Email to Customers
To Reckon Accounts Hosted customers,
Due to ongoing growth of Reckon Accounts Hosted, increasing demand and our quest to provide a world-class service, Reckon embarked on a necessary upgrade to the underlying infrastructure of the service last weekend.
As a result of this process on Monday, 2 June 2014, some of you may have experienced difficulties accessing the Reckon Accounts Hosted service.
We’d like to apologise for the frustration that these difficulties with the service might have caused you.
Some of the difficulties customers reported included:
- Slow login to the service,
- Slow running of certain reports, and
- At peak times of the day some were unable to login on the first try.
What caused the Reckon Accounts Hosted login issue?
The significant change to the underlying infrastructure involved upgrading to a technology platform that now gives us greater visibility, flexibility and control over the server infrastructure supporting the service. This upgrade carried out in preparation for our busiest time of the year, now improves the stability, speed and performance of the service overall.
Following the upgrade early on Monday, 2 June, we detected an issue with the configuration of our servers’ storage that resulted in a number of users experiencing some of the issues as mentioned above.
Our technical teams worked relentlessly during this period to resolve the issues being experienced by customers and by Tuesday afternoon our support enquiries indicated that most customer problems were resolved. We are now getting positive feedback about the service.
Throughout this time the Reckon Community was regularly updated, and customer queries through our contact centre as well as social media channels were answered.
What did we achieve as a result of the upgrade?
We know that the Reckon Accounts Hosted service is a critical business tool for thousands of businesses. As a result of the upgrade to the underlying infrastructure of the service we now have:
- Increased capacity to deal with increasing demand, and
- Better stability and reliability during peak times.
Our ongoing improvements to the service
We also acknowledge that improvements to the service overall are essential. At a date soon to be announced, we are planning to launch a new version of Reckon Accounts Hosted. This new version will provide:
- A more streamlined login process so that all users can access Reckon Accounts Hosted from any device without the need to install any plug-ins or agents,
- A single version of Reckon Accounts Hosted to provide one service for all users, meaning all users will have access to a single premium service,
- Improved printing capabilities, so that your business can easily select a local printer without needing to worry about configurations within Reckon Accounts Hosted, and
- Improved data file backup management capabilities so you have greater visibility and control over the backup of your data files.
We will also work on improving how we communicate with you to ensure you are informed as early as possible of any potential trouble spots.
Again, we apologise for any frustration that difficulties with the Reckon Accounts Hosted service may have caused you. This message will be posted on the Reckon Community to enable you to have an open dialogue with us about the future of the Reckon Accounts Hosted service.
Yours sincerely,
Clive Rabie
Chief Executive Officer