AP Essentials - Slow processing of emails

Overview On Sep 10 from 06:40 to 16:30UTC the processing of inbound mails to the EU hosted AP Essentials service stopped for some documents for some customers. This was caused by a service failure in one of the responsible servers and triggered by automated security updates. Once restarted the pending items were processed successfully.

Incident Detail
Once alerted to the issue, our technical team identified the failed service and restarted this to resume the processing of inbound documents. Queued items were successfully processed and customers advised on what action to take should any duplicates be reported.

Resolution
The immediate resolution was to restart the failed services, additional monitoring has been added to identify this type of failure and speed up detection in future should the same situation arise. Controls around the security updates are also reviewed to ensure such updates no longer interfere with routine operation.