Summary of our January 11, 2021 outage
by January 13, 2021
On Monday January 11, between 12:59pm EST and 1:55pm EST, we experienced a major outage of the TaxJar platform. During this time, TaxJar customers were not able to access the TaxJar App or use the TaxJar API. We know this was impactful, and we’re truly sorry it happened.
With a historical uptime record of 99.99%, we have proven we can deliver industry-leading levels of performance. As is The TaxJar Way, we don’t shy away from our mistakes. We take full ownership of them and apply lessons learned to help us be the sales tax technology partner scaling e-commerce companies deserve. In pursuit of doing better for our customers and our partners, we wanted to share more details about this outage.
The outage began during a routine, quarterly software update with our hosting vendor. We are working closely with the vendor to understand why a routine update we have performed a dozen times previously failed causing extended downtime.
Please know that we have already implemented the following operational changes to ensure this type of failure can not happen again:
- We updated our deployment pattern to allow us to better verify changes to production environments during infrastructure changes.
- We are conducting a full audit of our vendor provided managed services to ensure more consistent and transparent deployment patterns.
