Clarion Call texts heavily delayed on Friday 18th - any other services affected?

[AngryTechnician]

Like many we had a snow day on Friday last week, and helpfully our text messaging provider (Clarion Call) had severe performance issues which meant there were long delays before parents and staff received the closure notifications. They've issued an apology today, but this is far from the first problem we've had, and I've been recommending we look elsewhere for years.

 

Our DH, on the other hand, is frequently very defensive of Clarion Call for reasons I have yet to fathom, and is claiming that they weren't the only ones with problems last week, so there is no point in us considering alternatives. He specifically said that Parentmail had similar issues on Friday, but I've heard from school who had no problems. I'd be interested to hear from anyone using this or any other text services, and whether you had problems on Friday?

 

 

tl;dr: What service does your school use to text parents, and did you have problems with it on Friday 18th?

[localzuk]

We use ParentMail, no issues at all. They sent about 1.8 million messages on Friday with no issues. They sent half a million in 4 hours last night.

[FN-GM]

I believe SIMS InTocuh was fine as well.

[rh91uk]

We had issues too with CC.

[Rawns]

Our LA service uses Esendex and they had no problems/delays as far as I'm aware.

[chris_uk]

We use SMS Provider | Bulk SMS Software | SMS Marketing | Mediaburst here. Great service

[rich_tech]

We use callparent and truancy call here, only issue we had was with our own sites power in getting the message to parents, it was slow, but worked as expected for us with no complaints so far.

[Sylv3r]

No issues with KeepKidsSafe this morning, infact a lot of positive replies on our Facebook page that we managed to get the message out so quickly.

[Trapper]

Primary Contact

 

No problems. Works fine with an export dump from Facility or SIMS

[Edu-IT]

We never sent any SMS on Friday 18th, but we use TextAnywhere, and not come across any problems to date.

[AngryTechnician]

I have to say I didn't realise there were so many different services out there doing this - I was under the impression it was a few big ones and that was it. Keep them coming, the longer the list of alternatives when I inevitably get asked for it, the better!

[Edu-IT]

I imagine a lot of the systems 'hook into' the big SMS provider systems through API's and all that so while there are a lot of companies out there doing this, don't be surprised if some of them all use the same stuff in the background.

[john]

ParentMail user here an system been coping admirably given the volume of snowfall across the UK so well worth looking into. Pop and visit them at BETT if your visiting Mr AT

[dobsonl]

No problems with KeepKidsSafe for us this morning went through rather quickly and parents were replying saying Thank you so we know it worked as expected

[Mullaney18]

Got our message from school via Teachers2Parents this morning.

[robk]

Group call worked fine for us this morning.

[bossman]

keepKidsSafe worked just fine for us also, coupled with our website and the radio we covered everyone as no-one turned up at the gates.

[Fleetwood]

We use Teachers2Parents, no delay at all on Friday. Never had any problems with it

[enjay]

@AngryTechnician - as you know, we also have ClarionCall and we found that it was only the text delivery which was affected, emails were fine.

[mdench]

intouch services seems to have slipped on friday. Email sent out at 10am and my mum only got the email for my sister at 6pm so just as well i was in work that day.