Weather Gods Push Notification Problems (again)

By Weather Gods (Scott), 22 May, 2019

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi All,

I'm very sorry to report that once again we are suffering at the hands of the IBM infrastructure which queues and sends out our push notifications.

They had a critical incident yesterday and to be frank, everything is a bit of a mess.

It's affecting other customers, not just Weather Gods.

The problem is manifesting itself as sending duplicate notifications as well as old notifications - it appears they are holding on to them and then re-sending for good measure!!

For other people, they may not receive any at all.

Severe weather alerts are not affected as I built that system using Amazon AWS services (thankfully).

I can only apologise and hope this gets fixed quickly.

In the meantime my best suggestion is to going into Weather Gods Settings and swipe down to Pause All Notifications and switch that to on.

Once I hear more I will report back.

My apologies
Scott

Options

Comments

By DPinWI on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

I am in the many notifications camp. Yesterday, I got push notifications for the next day's weather many times, and I could tell they were not accurate because they varied wildly in the forecast.

Sorry for your frustrations, and I will probably take your advice for the day. The forecast stuff is nice, but not nearly as important to me as the severe alerts. So, pausing them for a little while isn't a big hassle at all.

Best of luck sorting it out.

By mendi on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

I wondered why I was getting notifications at random times with varying information. That makes sense now. I will pause my notifications in hopes this gets resolved soon.
Thank you for the explanation.

By Ekaj on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

Ditto for me about the notifications. So sorry you've been dealing with this so much, but I sincerely hope it gets sorted out for good in no time. Just curious though, can you transfer everything to Amazon and not just the severe weather alerts?

By Holger Fiallo on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

Same. Nuts.

By Weather Gods (Scott) on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

Thanks everybody for your understanding and patience.

IBM have informed me that this has now been fixed, so I have switched everything back on. It will take a couple of hours to warm up and start sending notifications.

If it looks like there are still problems then I will need to turn off again.

Ekaj, regarding Amazon, yes, that is now something I am having to actively consider. It was hard work with the severe weather alerts but IBM are now becoming too unreliable for us.

By Brooke on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

Weather Gods is a great app. I'm sorry you're having to deal with so many issues surrounding notifications. That has to be frustrating!!

By Weather Gods (Scott) on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

Thanks Brooke, it is very frustrating because no matter how hard you try to make a good app, it can be third parties who let you down. To IBM, we also just a very, very small company, so carry no sway when it comes to getting things fixed. Luckily I have some engineering contacts in IBM who are great at helping with these sort of issues, escalating internally on my behalf. If it wasn't for them I do believe this would take much longer to fix.

By MikeFont on Monday, May 27, 2019 - 00:22

I was a little more than confused when things began to go heywire. lol but I’m sure glad you cleared things up for us and now I can turn my alerts on again.
Thanks for sharing the details of this situation. ☺️