Incidents raised through Zendesk tickets - alphagov/notifications-manuals GitHub Wiki
When can this happen
Users can always submit support tickets from our support page. Out of our working hours they have the option to say the ticket is an emergency.
If they say it is an emergency, this will activate a Pagerduty P1 incident.
What to do
Not receiving their text message MFA to log into Notify
Ask them to turn their phone off and on and try again.
If that doesn't work then find their user using https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/find-users-by-email. Then click on 'change authentication for this user' and change it to email and ask them to try logging in again and this time they will get an email link instead.
Receive an error when uploading a CSV of recipient details
Sometimes a user tries to upload a CSV of notifications and receives a 5xx error or error page telling them to contact Notify. For some reason we are struggling to process their uploaded file or it is taking too long to process.
These things may fix their issue
- If it is an excel file they are uploading, ask the user to export it as a .csv file and upload that instead
- If the file is very very big and contains more than 50,000 rows, ask them to split it into smaller CSV files of say 10,000 or 20,000 rows
- Ensure there are no extra columns or rows in the spreadsheet that they don't need
- Copy the data out of the spreadsheet into another spreadsheet and try that
They need access to a service to send notifications (not an emergency)
They may say that they need access to a service to send notifications but unfortunately the person on the team is away or on holiday. Unfortunately this is not an emergency.
You can tell them that unfortunately we are unable to help during out of hours with this but we will be able to help on the next working day.
Percentage of notifications are marked as 'failed' (not an emergency)
If a user reports that some of their messages have been marked as 'failed' then this is not an emergency, even if it is a high percentage like 20%. We always expect between 1 - 10% of messages sent by Notify to go into failed. This is because users sometimes have their phones off, network issues, email addresses no longer existing, incorrect phone numbers.
You should tell the user that we have reviewed their support ticket and having some of your messages marked as failed is common behaviour and not something we are able to respond to out of hours. You can tell them that we will follow up with them the next working day to help answer any questions.
Cancel something they have sent (not an emergency)
Emails and text messages can not be cancelled once they have clicked sending.
A user can cancel a letter before 5:30pm by going to the individual letter in Notify and clicking the link to 'Cancel sending this letter'.
If a user has a lot of letters to cancel (they likely generated them using the API), unfortunately we do not have a great solution for this. We have a runbook entry for how to cancel them by going into the database but we suggest against doing this during out of hours support. If it is in the daytime, you can send a text message to a team member to escalate and see if they might be willing to help on their weekend and work through the runbook entry with you.