This morning around 8:50am EST Harvest began to perform slowly and was unavailable for short periods of time. We averted the immediate issue by doubling the number of application processes available to serve customer requests while we examined the underlying issue.

The core issue behind this morning’s incident is the tremendous adoption rate of the newly released Harvest for Mac application. This application has a new server resource profile and Harvest has had to scale rapidly to accommodate it. To make sure Harvest for Mac is always using fresh data, the application performs frequent calls to Harvest servers for the current Timesheet data. As it turns out the adoption rate of Harvest for Mac has been much faster than we scaled our resources to accommodate it. The immediate popularity of Harvest for Mac has almost doubled Harvest traffic levels within a few days.

We are making extensive changes to Harvest to allow for this new growth. Firstly, we are adding more servers and upgrading certain servers to increase their capacity. Additionally we are reworking the caching system which handles the Harvest for Mac data refresh process to make it more efficient. An update to Harvest for Mac will be released later today and we encourage all customers to install the update when prompted to do so.

We apologize if you were affected by the outage this morning. Thanks for bearing with us as we increase our capacity and make our applications more efficient, and thank you all for making Harvest for Mac so popular so quickly.