We apologize for the inconvenient email maintenance that required us to take the sending of emails offline over this past weekend. We had seen a rise in abuse of our email system. Note there was no effect on processing signups and transactions.
We deployed a dozen different improvements today (and of course several were enabled and enhanced with AI!). We re-enabled email sending early this afternoon (Monday, September 22) after the deployment of most of these improvements. There are still a few more things we will be doing over the coming days.
It is sad to see bad actors in the market, but as we approach 40,000 events per year sending close to 1 Billion emails the old rule of a bad apple spoils the whole barrel is appropriate. The bad apple showed up late Friday and into Saturday. We had a half a dozen very very high quality developers working on these improvements over the weekend and today, with our management team deeply involved. Bob made the call to stop the sending of emails mid day on Saturday out of an abundance of caution.
All of these improvements are mostly invisible to all of our users. It is the type of investment we make in infrastructure to ensure our system is scalable and safe for our customers and your participants, donors, members, volunteers and ticket buyers.
Our actions are reflective of the conservative nature of our employee owned company where the long term is more important than the short term. We heard from a number of frustrated customers who were trying to send emails over the weekend, and we sincerely apologize. Just know that we do our best to provide the quality type of system that we hope reflects well for much of the time for our customers.
Thank you for your support. We will continue to try to earn your trust.