Students of some Xen tenancies are getting an error when logging-in with their Username instead of Email Address

Incident Report for Xen Education

Postmortem

A customer reported an issue with their tenancy via email. The customer success team created a support request on behalf of the customer, and immediately escalated the incident with the Development team.

A fix was issued and the incident was closed at 12:50 PM (AEST).

Why did this happen?

The ability to login with username over the email is a new feature that was rolled-out as an option to all tenants, using a configuration variable.

The last production deployment overrode the configuration for a specific set of customers and set the default behaviour back to email instead of username, which prevented learners from using their username.

What was the incident’s duration?

The incident lasted 3 hours from discovery to remediation.

Were there any consequences or damages?

On Tuesday morning, students of a tenancy reported the validation errors. While it was still possible to login, the message was confusing to users and could prevent some of them from accessing the platform.

Some students were also having trouble resetting their password since the pop up box asked for email instead of the username, which some younger students may not have access to.

How was the incident addressed?

The Customer Success team created a support request on behalf of the customer, and immediately escalated the incident with the on-call support engineer who investigated the issue, identified it as a regression, then applied a fix involving a re-deployment of the applications(~2hrs), and then re-tested in Production.

What will prevent further similar incidents?

The QA team updated their automated testing scripts for all future deployment to prevent releasing the pipeline if an incorrect configuration item is detected against the source definitions for each customer using them.

The Scrum master and Lead Development Engineer also implemented additional process to ensure that customers configurations are not modified by developers directly.

Posted Jun 25, 2024 - 17:24 AEST

Resolved

Learners are shown an error message while filling their details on specific Xen tenancies, requesting them to use their email instead of their username. The reset password popup is also enforcing using the email instead.
Posted May 03, 2022 - 09:30 AEST