What went wrong? 27th June 2013

Categories: status

Last Thursday we had a considerable publishing problem that prevented us from getting the Quarterly National & UK Economic accounts datasets up in anything close to a timely manner.

Chris Giles from the FT was the first to notice;

Given all the issues the website has had over the last couple of years you would have thought we would be prepared for anything but this was a new problem and all the standard remeidial actions the development and support teams undertook were unsuccessful which is why there was such a delay.

The problem, once identified, was deceptively simple. Both the datasets that failed had character encoding issues due to unrecognised characters that essentially choked the automated process that creates and publishes the datasets.Now this has been identified we will be able to mitigate against it in the future but for now we can only apologise.