Problems with the Address Matching System on June 26
For those of you who may have experienced problems with entering addresses on Thursday, we want to inform you that we worked on it all day long!
It is now fixed.
For those of you interested in the gory details—there were two problems:
- The original problem was an old file that expired yesterday. But we did not know this until later in the day.
- The second and more pernicious problem was one we created as we were trying to figure out the first problem. Then after we figured out the first problem, this second problem was causing problems that was masking our understanding of the first problem.
After finally talking with a programmer at USPS late in the day, we got a clue about the second problem that we caused earlier today. Which meant we had two problems but were only looking for one. The problem we caused today while working on this, was that we deleted a configuration file that had customer keys in it. Furthermore, the system was automatically creating the file again, but without the keys. Once we figured that out, we restored it from the recycle bin and everything started working again because we had already solved the original problem.
The remainder of the issues were that my work arounds did not really work either. So all is well but we learned a lesson about our Address Matching system that has been working fine for 5 years with no problems. We need to have a graceful fallback if it ever stops working like it did last night.
So sorry for any trouble this may have caused you.