RDS outages

There have been some RDS outages during May. Apologies for any inconvenience these may have caused. During an outage, you can still access all content via the downloadable mobile app. 

These outages are a concern to us, Tactuum and the wider network. 

On Friday 22nd May, Tactuum implemented a failover system. This means that during any future outage, there will be an automatic transfer to a current copy of the website on a separate interface.  

If the failover version should fail, a help page will appear to give you the option to manually access the RDS at admin.rightdecisions (giving a second line of contingency if necessary). 

Tactuum have carefully looked into the causes of the RDS outages and have taken staff away from other work to do this. One cause of the outages has been intensive attacks from AI bots. These are not malicious attacks, but the result of RDS pages now having high prominence on search engines. This makes the RDS a natural target for bots to crawl the site.  

Tactuum have now excluded AI bots from the RDS website, but this will be altered at some stage as AI crawling is required for findability. 

Tactuum have noticed an exceptionally high number of requests to a few pages which have now been unpublished. There may have been corruption errors in these pages and there seems to be an issue with the code in media files 

With the failover and second line contingency, we are doing all we can to avoid future outages on RDS.