Hi everyone

As you know, we had this critical incident at AWS yesterday that ended up taking down 211 sites from about 7.30am AEST / 9.30am NZST today with sites back by 12pm / 2pm. MYOB were not the only client of AWS affected and we worked closely with AWS over this time to get back and running as soon as possible. We appreciate that this incident put our partners and our clients under tremendous stress which we sincerely regret and we hoped that the regular updates helped to manage through some of this. In fact, this incident also placed tremendous stress on MYOB’s teams and we appreciate the notes of support we have received today from some partners and I want to also thank our team for the massive effort involved in keeping the impact to the lowest level achievable.

This outage was of course extremely unusual and in the 4.5 years we have been running our Advanced environment, AWS have not had an incident like this before. We do not have the full post-incident review report from AWS as yet but we remain convinced that AWS is one of the best companies worldwide providing these services and remain committed to their services.

We will be sending a direct email to all the clients affected by the incident today to apologise for the impact of the incident on their teams and their businesses and we will post a copy of that letter in the forum for you. From a communications point of view, one of the learnings we have is that the status.myob.com page is not optimal to convey to partners and clients what is going on. For example, we showed today that 40 out of 42 services were affected whereas it was about 35% of sites. The reason it displayed that way is that the clients where spread pretty much across all the stacks we run, which is what the page reflects. So we will be considering how to improve that page in the future.

One question that some of you in customer-facing roles might encounter from clients is a demand for compensation for the disruption they experienced (they have already started) and I thought it would be worthwhile sharing MYOB’s perspective on this which hopefully it aligns with our partners’ views as well.

Firstly, it is worth understanding that all of our clients have subscribed for the MYOB Advanced service under the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement (EULA) which they have signed. Clause 2(c) of the EULA covers the scenario of an unplanned disruption to our service:

• MYOB Advanced could be disrupted if system(s) failure occurs due to technology used by us in providing MYOB Advanced. Online services are subject to interruption, breakdown, viruses, delays, interception, interference and other errors involving communications networks, computer systems, servers, providers and computer equipment and software.

 In other words, clients have subscribed for the service on the basis that unplanned interruptions may occur and that this is a risk which can occur. MYOB considers that it has no obligation to pay compensation resulting from the P1 incident.

Secondly from a commercial perspective, we think the following points are quite relevant and important in setting context:

• MYOB Advanced is a high quality service that has had delivered 99.984% over the lasts 12 months uptime including this incident. This is actually above our 99.5% target as noted in our service level document.  Note that the method of calculating uptime is pretty standard across cloud providers and excludes planned maintenance (the definition can be found in the MYOB Advanced Service Levels page at myob.com.au/myob_advanced/servicelevels. This link is provided in the EULA for clients).
• Public cloud services such as MYOB Advanced generally provide better uptime and availability than clients experience from their own on-premise solutions. There are regular reports of client networks getting hacked or suffering from malware, ransomware or other viruses.
• Clients pay a relatively minor amount of money for the massive value this service provides with many clients paying < $10k per month for a service that allows their entire business to operate.
• No ERP cloud provider warrants to cover clients for the consequential losses or damages that might ensure from an unplanned interruption because of course it would be commercially unfeasible for anyone to provide that, especially for the relatively small amounts of revenue charged for the service.

 Thirdly from a reputational damage perspective, again we would stress that our provider is one of the best in the world in providing these services, the high quality of the service uptime in general and the regret we feel for the interruption and the continuing work to ensure our service is of the highest possible quality.

Overall the bottom line is that unfortunately there is a risk of unplanned interruptions in these services which all clients fundamentally have accepted as part of choosing to use this sort of service rather than provide their own hardware and infrastructure services.

We encourage all partners to work with their clients to manage their queries, concerns or demands. We only have a few partner managers who are there to support our partners and will become quickly overwhelmed if they need to field calls with many clients and therefore we would not give our clients the service we would want.

Regards

Gary Katzeff
Acting Head of Enterprise Solutions

MYOB
P +61 2 9089 9157  M +61 433 587 978
Level 5, 45 Clarence Street
Sydney NSW 2000
www.myob.com

Hi all

As mentioned in my previous post on the AWS outage, we were planning to send a direct communication to the 211 clients affected to talk about the impact of the outage. We are now almost ready to send it so please see below the proof of the eDM we are sending to clients this afternoon.

Regards

Gary

IMPORTANT NOTE: re reply-to email address in client eDM

Hi all

Please note the "reply-to" email address used in the client eDM sent on Friday bounces back if clients do attempt to reply to the eDM. We did not specify not to reply to the eDM but hopefully any client that is having an issue will be attempting to contact their partner rather than replying to the eDM. Replying to eDMs is not a usual process anyway and we closed the eDM by requesting that they contact their partner.

If any client does note to you that replying to the eDM yielded a bounce back, please let them know that they are best served by engaging with you directly and you will manage and engage MYOB if necessary.

Regards

Gary