23rd
Big Blues
I got an email today at 1:50pm. IBM’s Websphere Commerce platform, which I support all over my company’s clients, had a small glitch. They had an “End Date” on a “Shipping Arrangement”, and that end date was last night at 11pm.
If you still had this default date in your DB your site kept running but gave errors whenever someone tried to add an item to their shopping cart. That error was “Out Of Stock”, which was wholly inaccurate and less than unhelpful, in terms of troubleshooting. There was an error in the log about not being able to find the “fufillment center” [sic].
IBM sent out an email 15hours later in case your site has been unable to accept orders for that long.
My monitoring woke me up around 4am telling me it had been a suspicious amount of time without an order, and I spent hours looking at inventory, db and app server conditions, and finally engaged my DBA who had done some work over the weekend. She tracked it down and we got it fixed, well before IBM thought to alert anyone, I guess.
The fix IBM sent? Enter a new date: 2018-06-22, 23:00. This way in ten year’s it’ll hit on a Friday night. Mark your calendars now, I’ll wager a few of your favorite sites won’t be accepting orders.
PS We set ours to 2100, when commerce websites will of course be trying to access users’ purchasing servers with items Amazon suggests, payment will be in rupees, shipment just digital files to your matter-printer. This bug will cost numerous pensioners (you and me) their lives.