On Saturday 16 November 2024 we put the Chip app into maintenance mode between 08:50 and 14:45 to resolve a technical issue that affected access to the app for some of our members.

We want to thank our community for their patience and support while our team worked quickly to resolve this and get the app back up and running as normal.

As part of our commitment to transparency with you, we promised a full explainer about what happened. Please find it below.    

A quick summary of the issue

One of the key databases used to serve data to the app became unresponsive. In order to protect other parts of the system from further impact, and to allow us to recover much more quickly, we made the decision to put the app into maintenance mode for all users. Full service was restored at 14:45 on Saturday 16 November 2024.

What happened in detail

Early on Saturday morning, following an underlying issue with the cloud server hosting one of our databases, the automatic fallback procedure didn’t work as intended. Our engineers on-call were promptly alerted, and took action to understand the issue and mitigate any risk.

We then initiated our well-rehearsed procedure for manually promoting one of the backup databases to become the primary database. After thoroughly testing the integrity of the data, our system stability, and the app functionality, we were able to confidently restore access to the app for all users.

Full service was restored at 14:45 on Saturday 16 November 2024.

We would like to make it clear that all money held with Chip remains protected with our banking and investment partners as per usual and this only affected access to the app.

We understand that the error and prolonged outage caused stress and inconvenience for those members that were affected. On behalf of the team at Chip, I want to offer a sincere apology. We recognise the impact incidents like this can have and assure you we take them very seriously.

What we’ve learned and how we’re improving

Having identified the issue with the database, we have begun work on migrating this part of the system to a more resilient service, and we also plan to regularly run this specific scenario in our test environments to learn more.

Incidents of this nature are rare at Chip, but we know how important it is to stop them happening again. I’m very proud of how the team handled it, with everyone calmly and professionally working to fix it as quickly as possible.

In addition to enhancing our tech QA processes, we've made significant improvements to our incident response plans across operations, customer support, and communications to better handle any future service interruptions of this scale.

To put it simply, we’ve learned a great deal from this experience, and Chip is now stronger and better equipped than ever to deal with any future incidents, should they arise.

A thank you to the Chip Community

To close, I want to express our gratitude again to the community for your patience and support – both on social media and through the thoughtful messages sent to our customer service team as we kept you updated and awaited a resolution.

Your understanding and encouragement has been a powerful reminder that we have the support of our members. As we always say, Chip is your wealth app, and we’re building it for you and with you.