Problems this morning with Bromcom?

[synaesthesia]

It's clearly lightyears ahead of SIMS. I'm on the fence personally on Bromcom vs Arbor - the latter had it's share of performance issues now and then but nothing I can remember over a couple of minutes of "ooh, this is going slow".

And a bit like some other service providers, it's not a good look when a quick search on this and other forums is full of "Is XYZ down?" "More problems with XYZ" etc, whether it's MIS, broadband, safeguarding reporting systems, filtering systems - all rather important to the safe running of educational establishments!

[DrCheese]

It's not good they keep having this at the start of academic years, when some schools will have just rolled this out & have nervous/grumpy staff about changing in the first place.

 

First impressions matter.

[Olliedawg]

See you all in September 2026?

[machy]

lol 

[synaesthesia]

23 minutes ago, Olliedawg said:

See you all in September 2026?

I don't think it's over yet....

 

Degraded system performance

We are still seeing some performance issues in the system at this time. We are working on this with the highest urgency.

Created at Sep 05 2025, 13:17 BST

[SpreadsheetJockey]

Quote

1 hour ago, E_G_R2 said:

oh joy 502 Bad Gateway - been reported but its making Arbour look very tempting when the contract is up for renewal 

 

 

Arbor has it's own issues - rather than crash and burn like Bromcom, it just slows down to a crawl in terms of processing. For example, when it's overloaded like at this time of year, timetable changes like room swaps (which are endless in September) take hours to show up in the system and sometimes edits fail entirely and there is no way to know at all... until you have 30 Year 9s queued at the wrong room, or a teacher running around in a different part of the building with no idea where their class is. It is a safeguarding nightmare until things settle down. Both databases are still better than SIMS though, by a mile.

[E_G_R2]

12 minutes ago, SpreadsheetJockey said:

 

Arbor has it's own issues - rather than crash and burn like Bromcom, it just slows down to a crawl in terms of processing. For example, when it's overloaded like at this time of year, timetable changes like room swaps (which are endless in September) take hours to show up in the system and sometimes edits fail entirely and there is no way to know at all... until you have 30 Year 9s queued at the wrong room, or a teacher running around in a different part of the building with no idea where their class is. It is a safeguarding nightmare until things settle down. Both databases are still better than SIMS though, by a mile.

back to sims it is then

[lowestbassnote]

Never mind auto-scaling Azure servers, Bromcom’s got auto-scaling apology boxes - and those may seem to be in highly available at BETT.

 

Still, to be fair, their tech team is no doubt pulling a full weekend shift on this, so credit where it’s due. What follows will probably be a long year of re-architecting.

 

Just can’t believe it’s down again now…

[falko1]

8 hours ago, psynegy said:

We were looking at a schedule to send the days registers to an email address each morning as a failsafe. Naturally there was an issue setting that up, but I believe they said they resolved that - so I should try again...

We are new, on-boarded this summer. Trying to get our heads around it all and the last two days has been painful with the disruption. Safe to say I could do with setting something like this up. Can you help point me in the right direction

[machy]

Got staff here complaining its still dog slow... 

 

Anyone else? 

[Tech1]

2 minutes ago, machy said:

Got staff here complaining its still dog slow... 

 

Anyone else? 

Not had any complaints here yet. The Bromcom status page is still showing 100% server degradation and although they said they were working on it all weekend the last update we received was on the 5th.

[kennysarmy]

Slow here... but then it's Monday - surely we can't expect BROMCOM to run fine every school day 😕

[Tech1]

 

Just received an update.

[kevin_lane]

Ouch !

[mthomas08]

Yeah.. looks like the weekend work didn't resolve the issue unless it's a different problem and bad timing.

 

 

[TheRobins]

Interested to see what they say when they publish what is causing this. But it seems to be linked to increased traffic as schools all log in this morning, was fine before about 7.50 this morning then the trouble started. 

[Tech1]

I would be very interested to know what work was done over the weekend. As a new school that's just migrated to Bromcom, with last week being our first official week, this has been highly disappointing.

[TheRobins]

Feel your pain, its going to leave a bad impression for the users.

 

Other MIS providers will be rubbing their hands with this one. 

[taz]

Same - we are completely down.  Can log in but not showing any data. Can't take registers, find contact details for children not at school - Bromcom is putting all our schools at risk from safeguarding perspective. This is our first year using it - very much regretting it now, after a week straight of outages.

[Pickle17]

Still not able to get on and this is 2 schools impacted. We did not have this issue last term when migrated. This is not an acceptable service. 

[Alis_Klar]

Was slow and then down completely here again for registers.

Edited September 8, 2025 by Alis_Klar

[mthomas08]

30 minutes ago, TheRobins said:

Feel your pain, its going to leave a bad impression for the users.

 

Other MIS providers will be rubbing their hands with this one. 

 

I can't speak for others like Arbor, but SIMs wasn't exactly any better...   and one main reason it had any kind of reliability is because of the work I put in and how I planned updates.

 

Updated during around holiday periods -  to make sure all equipment updated fine. Plus we would test key areas.

 

Avoid deploying when released due to patches to fix the updates. I won't discuss the times when an updated patch.. to fix an updated patch.. to fix another updated patch.. to fix the updated release.

 

All that before I get calls from Data Manager/Attendance/Exams about a glitch they have needs an URGENT patch and here it is. Which reboots SIMs and kicks users out.... The non urgent ones would be done remotely at home..

 

Even worse when the patches didn't even fix their problems......

 

UGH!!  As much as Bromcom having the performances issues are a headache... I do not miss SIMs at all...

[TheRobins]

100% agree on the SIMS sentiment there. I suspect looking at the errors this issue is around Azure and App Gateway, Microsoft and their cloud offerings like making sudden changes and patches with little testing which bring down systems of its customers. 

 

 

[synaesthesia]

And my "offline cache" suggestion seems more and more pertinent. The emergency services have offline caches for all their vital systems, it seems daft that too many people in Education are blinded by "but we should be cloud" "we mustn't have anything local" etc. 

[pete]

Occasionally working here (5 schools), but mostly not.