A big apology to anyone who experienced the outage of Lamplight this morning. Unfortunately the problem was with our service provider, AWS, and so out of our control. We worked with them to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Our systems are set up so that they automatically detect any problems, and if we experience an unusually high demand new servers will come into service within a couple of minutes so that normal service is restored. This morning there was a delay within AWS, our server provider, and the additional servers did not come into service as we’d expect. Unfortunately this was beyond our control, and we had to wait for the underlying AWS delays to resolve.

In the past we’ve considered spreading our servers to multiple locations to avoid problems like this, but found that it is either cost-prohibitive, or would mean that data would be located outside the UK which is not acceptable to many of our customers.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this outage has caused you.