BL3P.eu experienced downtime for a large part of the day yesterday. Although no funds were at risk at any point, it did result in customers not being able to access their funds for considerable time. We recognise the negative effects this may have had on our customers and the level of trust in BL3P. We would like to provide openness about what occurred yesterday and how we intend to prevent similar events from happening in the future.
We received a notice that BL3P.eu was not available early yesterday morning. We immediately started investigating the issue and discovered the cause was a hardware issue that could not be repaired remotely. A member of our team traveled to our datacenter, inspected our servers on location and determined the cause was indeed defective hardware. Our man on the ground attempted to fix the server with components from another server. Unfortunately, this turned out to be more difficult than expected.
The absence of one of our technical experts, as well as a busy weekend for our other services (bitonic.nl), caused the duration of the downtime to be significantly longer than we had hoped.
When we set up our servers over three years ago, we mainly focused on security. Now, it turns out, we put insufficient thought into adding redundancy, providing technical documentation and manuals for emergencies such as the one that occurred yesterday. In addition, our level of monitoring was insufficient. This caused us to identify the issue later than would have been possible.
Although the event was caused by force majeure, we deeply regret we have not been able to meet our standards of service. For this, we offer our sincere apologies. It stands without question that we will investigate the exact causes of the issue and improve wherever we can.
The fact that the downtime occurred so briefly after we had just announced that BL3P would now be accessible to all of Europe makes this an extra painful lesson for us. However, it does provide us with extra motivation to ensure we continue to improve BL3P to build it into the reliable trading platform we envision.