A letter to Ascend retailers
Recent outages made it very difficult for a large number of North American retailers east of the Mississippi to conduct business as normal.
All of us at Ascend sincerely value you as customers and pride ourselves on having the best system and best support in the business. Unfortunately, we fell short of those values last week and our shortcoming affected your business and your customers, which is unacceptable.
We’re sorry.
We are taking the situation extremely seriously and we want to share an update on what happened, what fixed it, and what we’re doing to prevent it from happening again.
What went wrong: Our Stratus cloud services are set to automatically scale up during peak business hours in each region. The auto-scaling for the North America East region failed, which caused long delays or complete outages for multi-store functions, customer or product creation, transactions, and Ascend HQ data.
What fixed it: When manually triggering the scaling function failed, our product and development teams created and transferred retailers to a new service pool that scaled appropriately. This team has continued working with Microsoft to discover the root cause of the initial issue.
What we’re doing so it doesn’t happen again:
- We’re devoting an extra month to our next release. The exact date hasn’t been confirmed, but you can expect to see the next release of Ascend in July 2019.
- We will spend that extra month focused on fixing the issues we have seen lately and working closely with our partners at Microsoft.
- Ascend is a hybrid system and we will continue to look for ways to get the best of both worlds. Our goal is to have the reliability of a local/on-premise system, with the speed and sharing capabilities of a cloud system – even when the internet or certain services are down.
- We also need to improve our ability to communicate with you regarding system updates and issues. We are revisiting our existing communication channels to keep you as informed as possible about everything Ascend.
It is our mission to provide you with the best systems and best support. On behalf of the the entire Ascend team, thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve our process and services.
If you’d like to reach a member of our team, please click here.
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