To our Wonderful Civic Theatre Students and Families,

After months of planning, our team was ready to kick off the 2024-25 registration this morning with all of you.  Taking care of our families is something we take great pride in, so we were as devastated as you when the payment processing platform went down shortly after 7am.  We anticipated it was just a glitch and that it would come back up in a few moments.  Once we realized the scope of the problem, we immediately took down the registration system so that we could respond to your calls and emails.  The payment processing platform came back up about an hour later, but by that time it had been down for too long for us to be able to fairly register our students.  We needed time to respond and process every phone call and email that came into Civic this morning.

As we look ahead to the next couple of days, we want you to know what to expect.  

First, the registration system will not be put back online until early next week.  Instead, the education team will contact each family that entered the registration system this morning in the order they entered the system.  We will verify what classes you were attempting to register for and register you over the phone if there is space available in the class.  If the class is full, you will be placed on the wait list.  This process will take a few days to complete.

Second, if you have any pending credit card transactions, you should see them drop off in the next day or two.  If they are still showing come Monday. please let us know so that we can follow up on our end.

Lastly, once we have contacted everyone and have a firm confirmation from the credit card processor that everything has been corrected and working as it should, then we will put the registration system back online.  We will let you know ahead of time via e-mail communication and social media when that will happen.

We appreciate all of the feedback, support and understanding we received today.  Our Civic students and families are the best!

– The Education Staff of Grand Rapids Civic Theatre’s School of Theatre Arts

 

I wanted to reach out regarding the challenges experienced with the registration process on our platform this morning, specifically surrounding the processing of credit card payments.

Firstly, I’d like to express our sincere regret for the inconvenience this caused to your 2024-2025 class registrations. We understand how critical a smooth registration process is to your operations, and we are working diligently to ensure that these issues are resolved as quickly as possible.

Upon investigation, we have identified that the payment processing issues were likely due to a confluence of external factors affecting several critical infrastructure providers. Specifically, there were significant disruptions on the Microsoft Cloud platform (Azure) this morning, which is a part of the infrastructure supporting our registration solution. These disruptions caused intermittent connectivity issues and slowdowns that may have impacted the processing of transactions on our platform.

In addition to the cloud service disruptions, our payment processing partner experienced a temporary system outage that lasted for approximately one hour. This outage directly impacted the ability to process credit card transactions during that time, which we believe was a significant factor contributing to the registration issues encountered this morning.

While we do not directly manage credit card processing, we partner with third-party financial service providers to ensure seamless transactions. Unfortunately, the combination of the cloud service disruptions and the payment processor’s system outage created a perfect storm that prevented the registration processes from succeeding.  

We are closely monitoring the situation and are in communication with our partners to better understand the full scope of the issues and to ensure that measures are in place to prevent similar disruptions in the future.

Please be assured that our team is here to support you through this process, and we are committed to ensuring that our platform is functioning optimally moving forward. If you have any further questions or need additional support, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for your understanding and continued partnership.

Best regards,

Charlie Frankel

President and CEO

Easy-Ware Corporation