Dear Homeschool Planet Subscriber,

9/2/2015:

We wanted to give you an update on the what we’ve have done in the aftermath of Monday’s outage.

In today’s update, we made a significant change that will allow you to view your schedule even if, as happened on Monday, the central server unexpectedly goes off line.

In the event of a similar outage in the future, we have determined that we will be able to cut the recovery time from 7 hours to approximately 1 hour, and are working on an additional enhancement that could allow us to restore service within minutes.

8/31/2015:

As you may know, Homeschool Planet was unexpectedly offline today from 7:10 am Eastern to 1:49 pm Eastern.

We would like you to know what happened and what we are doing about it.

What Happened?

This morning, August 31 at approximately 7:10 am Eastern, our central server was taken offline unexpectedly owing to a serious system failure. We detected the problem within minutes and began our recovery process.

We restored service at 1:49 pm Eastern. Homeschool Planet was unavailable for 6 hours and 39 minutes.

Did You Lose Any Data?

We make frequent backups of your data.

In this case, our system had completed a system-wide backup at 6:51 am Eastern, approximately twenty minutes before the system failure. If you made any changes to your account during those twenty minutes, it’s possible we lost those changes, for which we are very sorry.

What Are We Doing About It?

Fortunately, such failures are rare. In three years of operation, this is the first time we have experienced this particular kind of problem.

That said, we acknowledge that the down time was extremely painful. We are taking the following steps to help ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future, and to mitigate the impact if it does:

• We are investigating the root problem. We will take all steps necessary to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
• Our new top development priority will be to ensure that you can always view your schedule, even if a problem like this does happen again.
• We are investigating software and hardware changes we can make to significantly speed the recovery time, should that become necessary.

Again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience you experienced today. We will do everything we can to help ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Sincerely,

Your friends at Homeschool Planet