Automatic table reminder emails are not being sent

Update timeline

1. investigating Nov 19, 2025, 06:43 AM UTC

   We are currently investigating an issue where automatic table reminders are not being sent. The issue started on 13 November. The issue doesn't concern approval messages, birthday or well-being notifications or the messages of users requesting for new passwords. We will do our best to send all of the table reminders again, that have been unsent during this time, as soon as the issue is resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience. More information will follow. Your Sympa Team

2. investigating Nov 19, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

   We are still investigating this issue. Impact is limited to automatic table reminder emails only. Approval messages, birthday and well-being notifications, and password reset emails are NOT affected. We will post another update as we proceed with investigations. Your Sympa Team

3. identified Nov 19, 2025, 05:52 PM UTC

   We are testing a fix, and testing will continue overnight. Impact remains limited to automatic table reminder emails. Approval messages, birthday and well-being notifications, and password reset emails are not affected. Next update by 12:00 EET on Thu 20 Nov 2025.

4. monitoring Nov 20, 2025, 10:35 AM UTC

   We have deployed a fix and are monitoring. Table reminder emails are expected to resume overnight as scheduled. We are evaluating options to resend reminders missed during the incident. Your Sympa Team

5. resolved Nov 21, 2025, 01:15 PM UTC

   The incident is resolved and the service is operating normally in production. We will ensure that all approval notifications missed during the incident are reprocessed, and users will start seeing them as they are handled. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Your Sympa Team

6. postmortem Nov 25, 2025, 11:38 AM UTC

   **Post Mortem: Automatic Table Reminder Emails Not Sent** Incident timeframe: 13–21 November 2025 Resolved: 21 Nov 2025 at 15:15 EET Impact: Automatic table reminder emails were not sent as expected **Summary** Between 13 and 21 November, automatic table reminder emails were not delivered as scheduled in the production environment. Other notification types — such as approval messages, password reset emails, and well-being or birthday notifications — were not affected. The issue was resolved on 21 November, after which normal delivery resumed. All table reminder emails that had been delayed during the incident were successfully reprocessed and delivered during Thursday and Friday \(21–22 Nov\). **Technical Overview** The issue was resolved through a targeted update to our background processing component responsible for handling scheduled messages. We became aware that the internal process responsible for reminder delivery was not executing as intended due to an unintended configuration state. A controlled update has since restored expected behavior, and the system is fully operational. **Recovery Actions** All missed reminder emails were re-sent during 21–22 November. Scheduled reminder email delivery resumed automatically and has remained stable since. Additional monitoring has been implemented to detect irregularities in reminder processing earlier. **Preventive Improvements** To reduce the risk of similar issues in the future, we have: Enhanced monitoring around the scheduled messaging pipeline, allowing us to react more quickly to any abnormalities. Started reviewing the scalability and timeout behavior of reminder queries to ensure they remain reliable even under increased data loads. Initiated fine-tuning of the reminder delivery mechanism, to prevent potential bottlenecks related to query size or performance over time. **Final Notes** We sincerely thank you for your patience during the incident. We're committed to continuous improvement of our notification infrastructure to ensure dependable delivery of all critical messages. — Your Sympa Team