A background issue with AWS SES (email sending) caused messaging and search to slow and, in some cases, stop on Tuesday, the 1st of September. The issue began after 9.30 am (AEST) and was detected at 11:45 am, when the outages became severe enough to trigger a detection notification. The fix was implemented between 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm, and full resolution was confirmed by 2:00 pm.

Impact

• Messaging: slowed significantly, with some periods of failure.
• Duration: approximately 11:30 am to 2:00 pm.
• Customer-facing impact was limited; some reports were received during the incident.
• Only backend message sending was affected, and there was no front-end impact.

Follow-up actions

• Add further time-based monitoring for all background notification services to reduce detection time.