Is Arbor Education down?

We recognise that some customers have been experiencing an issue where they are encountering intermittent errors messages and system slowness on their Arbor site. We’re very sorry for any disruption caused and are working on this as an urgent priority.

We’re continuing to investigate the slow loading and site unavailability messages currently being experienced by customers. We are currently working on identifying the root cause as a priority. We’re very sorry for any disruption caused and are working on this as an urgent priority.

Our engineers have implemented a fix for the site unavailability and slowness issues. All customers should now be able to access their Arbor sites as expected. We will continue to monitor performance closely throughout the day and a full retrospective of today’s incident will be carried out. We’re sorry for any disruption caused and would like to thank customers for their patience while we worked on this. A post-incident report will be available in due course.

Post Incident Report What Happened This morning, 10th September 2026, starting at 9:56 am, customers experienced increased page load times and intermittent errors. Our team identified the issue at 10:04 am, and as a precaution at 10:23 we began a rollback of the latest release. The issue continued despite the rollback; therefore confirming the issue was not related to the new release. The problem instead lay in an infrastructure configuration that impacted routine operations, causing 7-13% of requests to stall and time out. How We Resolved It Identified the Issue: We became aware of the slowdown at 10:04 am and began investigating immediately. Initiated a Rollback: At 10:23 am, as a precaution, we began rolling back the recent release. Failed Over to Fresh Infrastructure: As the rollback did not resolve the issue, at 10:51 am we began shifting traffic to a separate, freshly prepared set of servers unaffected by the underlying issue, to restore service more quickly. Full Restoration: The transition was completed by 11:05 am, at which point all traffic was being served normally. Preventing Future Issues We are correcting the underlying infrastructure to remove the risk of a similar slowdown. We are also reviewing how our automated server-scaling system responds during incidents like this one to prevent it from adding further strain while an issue is being resolved. We’re very sorry for the disruption this caused, and thank you for your patience while we worked to restore service this morning.

Microsoft is currently experiencing an active service incident (tracked as EX1467029) affecting Exchange Online, causing delays sending and receiving emails to and from external domains. If you use a Microsoft-hosted email address (for example Outlook, Hotmail, or a work email on Microsoft 365), you may see delays in emails to or from our teams or those sent from Arbor while this is ongoing. Please do not re-try sending emails at this time. We will continue to monitor Microsoft’s status page for any further updates.

Microsoft have confirmed that this incident is now resolved and emails sent to and from users with Microsoft hosted domains should no longer experience delays.

We are aware that some customers are currently experiencing error messages and are unable to log in to their Arbor site this morning. We’re very sorry for the disruption this is causing. Our Engineering Team is fully engaged and investigating this as an urgent priority. We will post our next update as soon as we have more information.

We’re continuing to investigate ongoing reports of customers encountering site unavailability and are currently working with our cloud service provider to identify a resolution. We’re very sorry for any disruption caused and are working on this as an urgent priority.

To accelerate service restoration and prevent further issues for impacted users, we have placed affected sites into Maintenance Mode. Our teams are actively working to bring all services back online as soon as possible. We’re very sorry for any disruption caused and are working on this as an urgent priority.

We are starting to see signs of recovery and access being restored for most customers. We’re continuing to monitor this closely and will provide a further update once all affected services have been restored.

Customers will now be able to access their Arbor sites as expected. We will continue working to resolve the root cause and monitor performance closely throughout the day. A full retrospective of today’s incident will be carried out. We’re sorry for any disruption caused and would like to thank customers for their patience while we worked on this.

Post Incident Report What Happened On the evening of 25th August 2026, as part of our preparations for the upcoming school year, our Platform Team scheduled a planned upgrade to increase our database capacity, ensuring smooth and reliable performance during peak usage. Unfortunately, an issue occurred during this process that resulted in an unexpected service interruption today. When the database scaling process was initiated, incoming user traffic was not automatically paused on affected school sites. Because the new database servers received traffic before they were fully ready, several database clusters failed to start up properly, leading to system outages. How We Resolved It Isolated Traffic: As soon as we became aware of the issue at 7.40am on 26th August 2026, we immediately placed the affected sites into maintenance mode to stop incoming requests and protect data integrity. Increased Capacity: We increased database capacity temporarily on the affected database clusters to support recovery. Phased Restoration: To protect system stability, we brought core backend systems and APIs online first, followed by restoring full web access once we confirmed everything was running smoothly. Because some replacement servers encountered unexpected secondary startup failures, the overall recovery window took longer than anticipated. Preventing Future Issues We are working directly with our infrastructure partners to conduct a comprehensive root cause analysis of why the replacement instances failed to start again. Moving forward, we are updating our scaling protocols to ensure maintenance mode is strictly automated during any database adjustments, preventing traffic from reaching expanding systems prematurely. We’re very sorry for the disruption this caused some schools and thank you for the understanding and patience shown this morning.

We are aware that customers are currently experiencing errors and are unable to log in to their Arbor site this morning. We sincerely apologise for the disruption this is causing. Our engineering team is fully engaged and investigating this as an urgent priority. We will post our next update as soon as we have more information.

We’re continuing to investigate ongoing reports of customers encountering site unavailability and are currently working with our cloud service provider to identify a resolution. We’re very sorry for any disruption caused and are working on this as an urgent priority.

Our engineers have implemented a fix for the site unavailability issues. All customers should now be able to access their Arbor sites, however, the initial loading of your Arbor site will take longer than usual. We sincerely apologise for the disruption caused and would like to thank customers for their continued patience.

Customers will now be able to access their Arbor sites as expected; the initial loading of Arbor will still be longer than expected for now. We will continue working to resolve the root cause and monitor performance closely throughout the day. A full retrospective of today’s incident will be carried out. We’re sorry for any disruption caused and would like to thank customers for their patience while we worked on this.

We’re aware that some customers are experiencing display issues within report cards when viewing as a PDF. We sincerely apologise for the disruption this is causing. Our engineering team are currently working on a fix to resolve the issue. We will post our next update as soon as we have more information.

The display issues within report cards have now been resolved. Customers impacted by this will need to regenerate their report cards to create a new PDF, which will appear as expected. We sincerely apologise again for the disruption this caused, and thank you for your patience while our teams worked to fix it.