Being teachers ourselves at DU, we know how much you rely on our website to complete your planning on a Sunday afternoon and the stress that can be caused when our site suddenly becomes unavailable, without warning. Today, we can only apologise for this. 

If your pupils also make use of our online learning platform DU Discover, we understand the disruption this may have caused you, with messages from your pupils or parents on a weekend. We also know that tomorrow morning may present challenges when pupils arrive in school unable to have completed their homework, or with inaccurate data from their completed assignments. We can only apologise for these things too. 

This email is written with full transparency and an explanation of what has caused this rare outage. We hope that it will reassure you that we are working hard as our popularity grows to minimise periods of downtime and constantly evolve our site, giving you MORE for LESS than our competitors. It will also give you the ability to explain these issues to those affected too. 

An unforeseen software issue occurred on our website today, meaning it suffered from intermittent availability. One of the key software libraries we use to power the DU Discover platform had a bug, which caused an error in the database. The error in the database compounded the availability of the website and resulted in several hours worth of results from our online learning platform being lost.

Our development and hosting partners worked throughout Sunday to mitigate many of the issues, while they identified the root cause. We have put in place changes to the software libraries and database to resolve this bug for the future. We are grateful our web team were able to overcome such challenging circumstances in a remarkable timeframe.

We thank you, our loyal subscribers, for the patience and understanding you have shown today and we wish you a positive week ahead. We are here for you if you need us at any time. 

For your information...
During today's period of downtime, we were able to assist many of our users in getting them the resources they needed quickly from our achieves. During periods of downtime, our team monitor our help email address ([email protected]) so your planning and resourcing can continue through outages.