Problems this morning with Bromcom?

[machy]

9 hours ago, BlackCat80 said:

 

14 days for a Root "Clause" Analysis?  

think we have been spoilt by the likes of Cloudflare where 14 hours for an RCA would result in half the c-suite apologising 

[Synkrox]

I've had a spate of parents saying they've not recieved messages we sent via MCAS. 
All looks good our end and via green jelly baby so I think an app only.

 

It could be a PICNIC issue, but it's quite a coincidence that I get a spate of these reports this week - especially with all the changes on the backend and the fact we couldn't see the MCAS messages page at all for several hours.

 

Anyone else getting similar reports?

[Olliedawg]

10 minutes ago, Synkrox said:

I've had a spate of parents saying they've not recieved messages we sent via MCAS. 
All looks good our end and via green jelly baby so I think an app only.

 

It could be a PICNIC issue, but it's quite a coincidence that I get a spate of these reports this week - especially with all the changes on the backend and the fact we couldn't see the MCAS messages page at all for several hours.

 

Anyone else getting similar reports?

We've had reports of a few parents not receiving announcements.. all looks fine from our end

[pete]

^ If I use the Jelly Baby (as we're apparently calling it now - I shall update our documentation) to access MCAS as the parent would see it.

 

The first time it sends me to the login page and doesn't work.

The second time, it loads the info but the student photo in top-left is missing (placeholder instead). 

 

Looking at the same child in the MCAS app (staff member's kid), the picture displays correctly.

 

 

[psynegy]

33 minutes ago, pete said:

^ If I use the Jelly Baby (as we're apparently calling it now - I shall update our documentation) to access MCAS as the parent would see it.

 

The first time it sends me to the login page and doesn't work.

The second time, it loads the info but the student photo in top-left is missing (placeholder instead). 

 

Looking at the same child in the MCAS app (staff member's kid), the picture displays correctly.

 

 

Make sure you're logging out of MCAS first, it can get very confused if you log in as another person over an existing session.

[Alis_Klar]

On 12/03/2026 at 10:25, supportman said:

I was also pretty shocked at that announcement. Makes them sound really amateur when image caching issues are blamed. I mean that's basic website stuff.

 

The whole system needs to be split up and streamlined.

 

Their product is amazing, but its clearly not scaling well.

Hard Disagree.  Their product is NOT amazing.  Its a usability and UI nightmare.  Tries to do too much stuff and isn't a replacement for every 3rd party product invented ever as claimed by their marketing.  Jack of all trades master of none. 

 

E.G. Why does it, have 2 different interfaces to taking a register depending on which route you take?  You need a PhD to create a report.  Their documentation is full of grammatical and even spelling errors.

[Synkrox]

2 minutes ago, Alis_Klar said:

Hard Disagree.  Their product is NOT amazing.  Its a usability and UI nightmare.  Tries to do too much stuff and isn't a replacement for every 3rd party product invented ever as claimed by their marketing.  Jack of all trades master of none. 

 

E.G. Why does it, have 2 different interfaces to taking a register depending on which route you take?  You need a PhD to create a report.  Their documentation is full of grammatical and even spelling errors.

 

You are not wrong. Why, many years later, there is still Old and New UI is madness. And I'm getting quite tired of regressions and releases of minimum viable products.

 

New student app being an untested mess, as was the teacher app and parent release previously,  downtime this week, removing bits without notice (thinking about dinner balances screen which got put back after we moaned). Adding bits without notice (new dietary and medical tabs that I'm still not sure if we should use or not)

 

It's infuriating.

 

Noone seems to have holistic oversight of the platform or an interest in making the whole thing as good as it can be. Each module has an "owner" that works in a silo and it doesn't matter if their part of the system has a UI relying on right clicking (parents evening) selecting then clicking "actions" (stu/staff lists) or double clicking it, or hovering over then finding a pencil.

 

I don't believe anyone at Bromcom truly takes customer feedback on board, they are ticket shifters. Good ideas get put on the "ideas" platform to die and get removed when you've got sick of asking. And noone there actually uses the system on a daily basis.

 

And oh my goodness the documentation 😂

 

After nearly 4 years I would not sign up to use them again.

 

This isn't something I've kept to myself either.
I've emailed (and had a reply from) Ali the boss, I've done several 1-1 customer feedback sessions and customer service complaints and logged tickets all along.

[jthompson]

One of the features that I like is the option to play the training videos at 2x speed. That really reduced my time spent in the training phase. /s

 

One thing that I think would help massively is for the web app to be properly responsive. That would almost entirely negate the need for a teacher mobile app.

[Wizard101]

I think its time for SIMS Nextgen. 

 

[psydii]

"Why, many years later, there is still Old and New UI is madness."  It's been 16 years and bits of Windows NT/95 UI still pop up in Windows 11. Similar on MacOS.  Linux command line tools etc have undergone a bit of a revolution too, and yet ifconfig and crontab persist.

 

"Jack of all trades master of none" because the first part is what the market demands. I think Arbor are just better at managing customer expectations (and tend to sell more to customers whose expectations are easier to manage).

 

"You need a PhD to create a report." Kinda true for any database really. School data isn't super simple. You either are happy to get what you are given, or you need to roll up your sleaves and get into the weeds. It's been years since I used bromcom, but a lot of what was done in rather limited reports in the platform then, does appear to just be part of the UI experience in alternatives. So what I am saying is it sucks that you need to write complex reports when a good ui should expose the data you need to analyse quite simply in the app itself, but eventually all MIS's throw up their hands and say git gud*.

 

I'm not going to comment on workflow, performance, support and feature development. My own experience was so long ago it isn't relevant, but the frustrations do sound hauntingly familiar.

 

 

*fwiw I never did (get good).

 

[psydii]

4 minutes ago, Wizard101 said:

I think its time for SIMS Nextgen. 

 

Ironically (becuase no one uses it so no one noticed) it wasn't loading for me early this morning. Fine* now though.

 

 

 

[Marci]

46 minutes ago, Synkrox said:

This isn't something I've kept to myself either.
I've emailed (and had a reply from) Ali the boss, I've done several 1-1 customer feedback sessions and customer service complaints and logged tickets all along.

Agreed on all points, and likewise (well, my boss has) ^^^ (except we've been at it with them for 8 years, which means we started with old-oldUI. NewUI for us will be the third UI overhaul staff will have had to get to grips with, hence we're still on the middle-ground OldUI)
 

Edited March 13 by Marci

[machy]

Anyone having issues with Alerts today?

[Dr_Zeux]

21 minutes ago, machy said:

Anyone having issues with Alerts today?

I did last week and logged a call with helpdesk.  Something happened over the weekend, they were working fine on Friday and stopped working on Monday... Through troubleshooting, I changed the settings to Office365 SMTP Service, that didn't work, changed them back to what they were before (in Config/Setup/System Settings) and it started working again - we hadn't changed anything and they had been working fine on the Friday before, for years...  God knows what happened, and why it suddenly wasn't working on Monday...

Edited March 20 by dbluston

[synaesthesia]

Indeed, there's an issue with comms in general - advised to untick the option to send push notifications too.

[BlackCat80]

22 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

Indeed, there's an issue with comms in general - advised to untick the option to send push notifications too.

Yes 100% there are problems since last week. Comms very unreliable.

[machy]

anyone having issues today? 

[TheRobins]

All good this way.

[Rob_D]

no one's complaining here.... yet.

[BlackCat80]

Quote

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Incident: Morning Registration Performance Degradation (HTTP 429 Errors)

Date: 3–10 March 2026

Resolved: 10 March (stabilisation), 16 March (full correction)

1. Executive Summary

Between 3 and 10 March 2026, customers experienced degraded performance during peak

morning registration periods, including slow response times, intermittent unavailability, and

“Too Many Requests” (HTTP 429) messages.

The issue was limited to peak usage windows and was fully stabilised following mitigation on 10

March, with further improvements applied on 16 March.

No data loss or security impact occurred.

2. Timeline (Summary)

• 3–10 Mar: Daily performance degradation during peak registration window

• 10 Mar (evening): Mitigation applied to reduce system load

• 11 Mar onwards: Performance stabilised

• 16 Mar: Additional corrections applied to improve resilience

3. Root Cause

Primary Cause (System Behaviour Under Load)

A combination of system configuration and application behaviour reduced effective processing

capacity during peak demand.

Technical Factors

• Imbalance in how concurrent processing tasks were handled reduced throughput under

load

• Increased request contention during peak activity led to request queuing and rejection

(HTTP 429)

• Repeated user retries amplified load, further impacting performance

4. Contributing Factors

• Peak usage pattern with high levels of concurrent activity

• Request retry behaviour increasing system load under stress

• Opportunities to optimise request handling and traffic distribution during peak periods

5. Impact Assessment

Systems Affected

• Bromcom MIS platform (registration workflows)

User Impact

• Slow performance and intermittent unavailability during peak morning periods

• Delays in completing registration activities

Data Impact

• No data loss, corruption, or unauthorised access

Risk Assessment

• Operational disruption only

• No information security or data integrity risk

Overall Risk: Low

6. Resolution

• Reduced unnecessary system requests through improved caching

• Adjusted request handling behaviour to improve performance under load

• Performance returned to expected levels following mitigation

7. Preventative Actions

• Optimisation of system behaviour under high concurrency

• Improved handling of repeated requests and retry patterns

• Additional traffic management controls to protect peak usage

• Ongoing improvements to resilience under varying load conditions

8. Conclusion

This incident was caused by a combination of system behaviour and configuration under peak

demand conditions, which reduced effective processing capacity.

Mitigations have restored stable performance, and further improvements are being

implemented to enhance resilience during high-demand periods

RCA published and... 

This RCA is weak, vague, and honestly does more to expose Bromcom’s weaknesses than reassure customers.

 

After a full week of disruption, all we get is generic wording like “system behaviour under load”, “configuration”, “request contention” and “retry behaviour”. That describes the symptoms. It does not properly explain the real cause.

 

The biggest question is still unanswered: what changed on or just before 3 March that suddenly triggered this? Schools did not all suddenly change how they used the system overnight. Morning registration is one of the most predictable usage peaks imaginable. So why did a platform that is supposed to support schools every day suddenly start falling over at the same time each morning?

 

That is why this RCA feels so weak. It avoids saying what actually changed, what exactly failed, why it took so many days to understand, and why Bromcom was giving customers reassurance before the issue was properly understood. Over the course of the incident we heard about scaling, gateway bottlenecks, caching, software changes and other fixes. Now the RCA rolls all of that into soft, abstract language that avoids real accountability.

 

To me, that exposes a much deeper weakness inside Bromcom. It suggests a platform where engineering teams do not fully understand the knock-on effect of changes under real load, and where leadership is either unwilling or unable to explain clearly what really happened. That is not a small concern for a system handling statutory attendance and other critical school operations.

 

Calling the overall risk “Low” is also frankly insulting. Schools were forced onto paper registers, staff lost time, trust in the system was damaged, and some users could not even rely on whether marks had actually saved. That is not how customers experience “low risk”.

 

A proper RCA would have clearly answered:

• what changed
• why it changed
• what broke
• why existing safeguards failed
• why early fixes did not work
• what process and leadership changes are being made to stop this happening again

This does not do that. It reads like a carefully sanitised incident summary written to reduce embarrassment, not a transparent root cause analysis written to rebuild customer confidence.

If Bromcom wants trust back, it needs to be much more honest than this.

 

[machy]

This reads as if its been written by an Engineer to be sent to someone who can PR better, but then just released

[Synkrox]

2 minutes ago, BlackCat80 said:

RCA published and... 

This RCA is weak, vague, and honestly does more to expose Bromcom’s weaknesses than reassure customers.

 

After a full week of disruption, all we get is generic wording like “system behaviour under load”, “configuration”, “request contention” and “retry behaviour”. That describes the symptoms. It does not properly explain the real cause.

 

The biggest question is still unanswered: what changed on or just before 3 March that suddenly triggered this? Schools did not all suddenly change how they used the system overnight. Morning registration is one of the most predictable usage peaks imaginable. So why did a platform that is supposed to support schools every day suddenly start falling over at the same time each morning?

 

That is why this RCA feels so weak. It avoids saying what actually changed, what exactly failed, why it took so many days to understand, and why Bromcom was giving customers reassurance before the issue was properly understood. Over the course of the incident we heard about scaling, gateway bottlenecks, caching, software changes and other fixes. Now the RCA rolls all of that into soft, abstract language that avoids real accountability.

 

To me, that exposes a much deeper weakness inside Bromcom. It suggests a platform where engineering teams do not fully understand the knock-on effect of changes under real load, and where leadership is either unwilling or unable to explain clearly what really happened. That is not a small concern for a system handling statutory attendance and other critical school operations.

 

Calling the overall risk “Low” is also frankly insulting. Schools were forced onto paper registers, staff lost time, trust in the system was damaged, and some users could not even rely on whether marks had actually saved. That is not how customers experience “low risk”.

 

A proper RCA would have clearly answered:

• what changed
• why it changed
• what broke
• why existing safeguards failed
• why early fixes did not work
• what process and leadership changes are being made to stop this happening again

This does not do that. It reads like a carefully sanitised incident summary written to reduce embarrassment, not a transparent root cause analysis written to rebuild customer confidence.

If Bromcom wants trust back, it needs to be much more honest than this.

 

 

This. 100%

 

This is the prompt you put into copilot, not the one you send to customers.

This is my favourite bit : • Repeated user retries amplified load, further impacting performance
I mean... what were they supposed to do?
 

[psynegy]

31 minutes ago, BlackCat80 said:

RCA published and... 

This RCA is weak, vague, and honestly does more to expose Bromcom’s weaknesses than reassure customers.

 

After a full week of disruption, all we get is generic wording like “system behaviour under load”, “configuration”, “request contention” and “retry behaviour”. That describes the symptoms. It does not properly explain the real cause.

 

The biggest question is still unanswered: what changed on or just before 3 March that suddenly triggered this? Schools did not all suddenly change how they used the system overnight. Morning registration is one of the most predictable usage peaks imaginable. So why did a platform that is supposed to support schools every day suddenly start falling over at the same time each morning?

 

That is why this RCA feels so weak. It avoids saying what actually changed, what exactly failed, why it took so many days to understand, and why Bromcom was giving customers reassurance before the issue was properly understood. Over the course of the incident we heard about scaling, gateway bottlenecks, caching, software changes and other fixes. Now the RCA rolls all of that into soft, abstract language that avoids real accountability.

 

To me, that exposes a much deeper weakness inside Bromcom. It suggests a platform where engineering teams do not fully understand the knock-on effect of changes under real load, and where leadership is either unwilling or unable to explain clearly what really happened. That is not a small concern for a system handling statutory attendance and other critical school operations.

 

Calling the overall risk “Low” is also frankly insulting. Schools were forced onto paper registers, staff lost time, trust in the system was damaged, and some users could not even rely on whether marks had actually saved. That is not how customers experience “low risk”.

 

A proper RCA would have clearly answered:

• what changed
• why it changed
• what broke
• why existing safeguards failed
• why early fixes did not work
• what process and leadership changes are being made to stop this happening again

This does not do that. It reads like a carefully sanitised incident summary written to reduce embarrassment, not a transparent root cause analysis written to rebuild customer confidence.

If Bromcom wants trust back, it needs to be much more honest than this.

 

Completely agree.

 

Especially the outrageous "low risk" part.

[TheRobins]

I can help summarise. 

 

• It was broke
• You made it worse
• We fixed it
• all was better. 

 

[Synkrox]

My personally written out complaint was finally replied to, with a copy-paste email from this address. Which I think says it all.

 

 

Heres the full text - I imagine most customers have already received this.

 

Dear Customer,    Between 3 and 10 March 2026, Bromcom schools across the country experienced service issues that led to a significant increase in contacts to our support teams. We apologise for the disruption and for the time it has taken to bring your complaint to a close. We understand the impact this caused, particularly during the critical period of taking registers.    While the issues experienced do not excuse the delay you encountered, they did contribute to longer-than-usual resolution times, including for your complaint. We recognise how frustrating this will have been and are grateful for your patience.    If you have not already done so, we encourage you to review the final Root Cause Analysis (RCA), which explains what led to the incident and outlines the remedial measures we have implemented to reduce the risk of recurrence.    We would also like to invite you to join our leadership team for a live webinar on Thursday 16 April at 14:30. During this session, we will speak openly about what happened, explain the steps already taken in response, and share the longer-term measures being put in place to strengthen performance and resilience. We will also discuss how we are working to rebuild your confidence in our service.    Please use the link below to register:   While we cannot undo the disruption that occurred, we hope our actions demonstrate our genuine commitment to addressing the matter and preventing a recurrence.    Thank you once again for your patience and understanding as we continue to enhance the reliability of the service you rely upon.    Kind regards,   Alastair McKenzie  Head of Customer Success