19. Outages

Thursday, October 7th, 2021

Yesterday one of the APIs I've been using for OCR (turning handwriting into digital characters) just completely stopped working.

I changed no code, so I'm assuming it was a temporary outage, or some configuration has gone wrong. Either way- it stopped me from doing much work on Paper Website yesterday.

Recently, I also got kicked off Amazon SES as my main email sending API for Mailoji. SES has recently tightened their rules, and the methods I was using for sending mail with emoji email addresses were apparently now prohibited.

Fortunately, I was already partly using Mailgun for a specific bit of Mailoji, so I've just migrated everything to using Mailgun for everything now. Fortunately everything kept running with no outages.

It's scary that a big company can cut you off with very little warning. If you're reading this now - Paper Website is back online and everything is working again.

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