Recap of Bol.com connection outage
Yesterday afternoon, we experienced a 3-hour outage in our connection with Bol.com. We’re truly sorry for the inconvenience. Here’s a recap of what happened.
The outage
The core of the outage was that the connection between Bol.com and Picqer didn’t work for most users on Monday 17 April, between 13:00 and 15:50.
During this period, the following functions were unavailable:
- New Bol.com orders were not imported into Picqer
- Stock changes in Picqer were not sent to Bol.com
- Orders marked as shipped in Picqer were not updated in Bol.com
Everything restored
Once we resolved the root cause at 15:50, we immediately started recovering all missed actions. We prioritized the most critical ones first.
- From 15:50, all orders were imported again. No orders were missed.
- By 17:00, stock for all products was updated at Bol.com. This ensured all stock changes during the outage were communicated.
- By 18:45, all orders shipped during the outage were marked as shipped in Bol.com.
Notifications about duplicate shipments
Since we couldn’t guarantee which shipped orders had already been marked as shipped, we re-submitted all Bol.com orders shipped during the outage. This resulted in some duplicate notifications in Picqer, saying that orders could not be marked as shipped.
These notifications were cleared this morning.
Check your open orders
We’ve restored all missed actions to the best of our ability. However, it's still possible that a shipment was missed.
To be sure nothing is missing, please check the Bol.com portal for any open orders from yesterday or earlier that you’ve already shipped. You can manually mark those as shipped within the Bol.com portal.
Technical details
Here’s what caused the outage:
We’re currently migrating to a new login method for Bol.com, which significantly changes how communication works between the two systems. At this stage, we have three types of connections:
- Old connections using the original login method
- Migrated connections using the new method
- Brand-new connections created directly using the new method
We discovered a bug affecting the last category. New connections were being disabled every hour due to a bug in our code. At 13:00, we deployed a new version of Picqer to fix this issue.
Unfortunately, that new version inadvertently deactivated all existing connections that hadn’t yet been migrated. Inactive connections don’t import orders or update stock and shipping info.
We noticed the issue after receiving reports from users and were able to identify and fix the error.
From 15:50 we had the situation under control and focused on resolving the impact. On Tuesday morning we started improving our monitoring and cleared all duplicate shipment notifications.
What’s next
The main reason the outage lasted so long is because we only noticed it after users reached out. That shouldn’t have happened. Normally, our monitoring and release processes catch errors quickly and we fix them right away. However, our monitoring didn’t yet track the drop in active Bol.com connections.
We’ve adjusted the monitoring today to ensure similar issues will be detected sooner in the future.
My apologies for this outage. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at support@picqer.com.
– Casper
