On Tuesday December 27 and Wednesday December 28, 2016, The Records Company (TRC) experienced hiccups in the normal service delivery for our customer portal on our website. Our customers reported that they couldn’t submit new requests to our portal, but they were still able to access records and prior requests.
Since 2016 proved to be a huge data breach year for many companies and since we store sensitive, confidential information for our clients, we were proactive and updated our website’s security certificates and plugins to ensure that we’re entering 2017 with the most up-to-date and effective online security measures. Since the end of the year is typically quite slow, we used the holiday down time period to gradually roll out the updates to minimize downtime. Contrary to our planning, our customers did experience a lag in service.
On Tuesday December 27 at approximately 2:00 p.m., our web engineers noticed that our newly updated security certificates were not registering with our server and database, forcing us to start updating our server, several of our site plugins, and a few licenses for third party software all on the same day. Everything was secure during this time: it was only a compatibility issue. We updated that throughout the remainder of Tuesday and into Wednesday (December 28).
We aim to ease any concerns and are stressing to our customers that at no point was their confidential data at risk or unsafe. Our service interruption was not in any way a security breach or the result of hacking. The issues our website and service portal faced on Tuesday and Wednesday came down to compatibility issues that arose while we were completing routine maintenance. Delving into website updates can be akin to opening Pandora’s box: once updates begin, it’s possible that unanticipated aspects will also be included by virtue of the interconnectedness of the components. Such is the nature of the web.
We’re delighted to announce that we’ve solved the issues that were disrupting service access for our customers. We’ll still be rolling out a few more website updates over the next week, but no other hiccups are anticipated. We apologize for any inconvenience or undue hardship this may have caused any of our customers. If you’re experiencing any issues at all submitting new requests via our portal or even accessing anything already set up, please let us know right away. As always, we are committed to providing the highest levels of customer service to ensure you can have what you need when you or your clients need it.
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