Dear Community,

Today, we experienced unprecedented downtime due to an issue with a dependent service partner that Join It relies on.

The service partner is an IBM company called Compose [Homepage // Status Page.] who hosts the databases that power Join It.

In my personal experience of 6 years as a customer of IBM’s Compose for this service -- I’ve never experienced an outage like the one that occurred today. However, the resulting unavailability of Join It doesn’t meet the high standard that we set for service to our customers.

Our initial focus was communicating with customers and their members, coordinating with Compose when possible, and getting the service back to normal (once Compose had resolved their downtime).

Since returning to normal, we’ve shifted our focus to prevention. We’ll be working with our partners at Compose to understand the underlying cause and the likelihood of future issues (As you probably are -- we’re full of questions that need answers: Why did this happen? What went wrong? What processes were missed that could have prevented this? How can we be sure this won’t happen again?).

Ultimately, Join It’s service to our customers relies on us picking the best technology partners for our critical dependencies. And today’s downtime fell short of the high standards that we demand.

As we determine the best path forward, please reach out to us if we can answer any questions, provide any further information, or assist with any of the effects of the unexpected downtime.

And lastly, after what has been a very long day -- we sincerely appreciate you, our community. We appreciate you for your patience today and for placing your trust in us. It’s something we take very seriously.

Sincerely,

Mitch Colleran

CEO & Founder, Join It