Smile experienced a brief slowdown today. It appears that one or more servers at blackberry made a very large number of connections which caused the server to delay connections to some Smile users, and cause others to time out. The problem has been corrected.
Smile News
Mail Errors
Smile experienced intermittent errors on webmail, and to a lesser extent on the POP system. We have corrected these problems and the system is back working normally again.
Mail Queue Processing
We are closely monitoring the mail queue, and backlog of messages. The spool is processing, and the server has accepted the mail, and is processing into mailboxes now, as well as managing everyone’s backlog of send messages. There are still a large number of messages to process, but it appears that the majority of mail will be processed within the next hour.
Reporting System Errors
For long time Smile customers, you’ll know that in the case of server issues we are usually quick to respond to outages and system problems. We maintain automatic onsite and off-site monitoring systems to alert our technicians 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of any system issues.
Smile recently changed service providers for our monitoring, and we found that there was an error in the monitoring system configuration that allowed test messages to go through, but when an actual service outage happened, none of our technicians were notified. As noted in the post below, no mail was lost, however mail was delayed for several hours. We understand that your business depends on your email, and our business depends on your business.
We have corrected the alerting configuration, and we are reviewing the server logs to determine the original problem.
All of us here at Smile understand that this is unacceptable, and we will be doing everything we can to ensure we are aware of all service affecting issues, and respond to them quickly in the future.
Please accept our apologies.
The Smile Internet Management and Staff
