Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Simple Stumbles On Feature Launch, But Lives To Tell Tale

It was just supposed to be the launch of a great new feature, but--to hear Portland-based Simple tell it--the launch of its Goals feature last week wasn't quite the glorious moment it had hoped for. Apparently, in its eagerness to announce new feature for its personalized banking service last Tuesday, Simple sent out an email via its customer support messaging system, which triggered a cascading failure at the startup. In a blog Post, Simple explained the outage to its users, saying that its announcement of the Goals feature prompted users to log into the site, but triggered so many users to sign in at once that those logins failed, which was compounded by an incorrect error message telling users their usernames and passphrases didn't match; plus even more severe mobile phone issues. The firm said it had put into place a number of fixes to address all of those issues, including refraining from sending out marketing messages via its customer support channel.