Maintaining our reputation as an innovative leader in the world of finance requires an incredibly reliable and secure system for processing financial transactions. Our engineers get us there. Read about how we get it done.
Though it seems to be firmly behind us, I wanted to quickly take a moment to apologize for some performance and reliability issues we had a couple weeks back. We understand how critical our service is to your daily operations, and we're deeply sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. In the spirit of transparency, here are comprehensive details on what happened, how it was fixed, and how we will ensure better reliability going forward.
If you were trying to get shit done on your expense reports around 3:30am UTC on the morning of Friday 16th June, then you would have noticed we had a site outage. We want to share the details of our Incident Response, not just to enhance our own learnings and behaviors for next time, but to spread that knowledge with our community as well.
Expensify has an unusual technology stack in many ways. For example, we don't use DNS internally — just configuration-managed /etc/hosts files — and it works great. Similarly, we only make limited use of AWS — instead hosting our own hardware for the web and database layer — and it works great. But most surprising of all is that we don't use MySQL or Postgres — instead using none other than SQLite — and it works great.
This month marks the sixth anniversary of Expensify. In May 2008, David Barrett got the idea of a world where expenses reports don't have to suck. With this idea in mind he rallied the troops and founded Expensify, and for six years we've been experimenting with countless ideas on how to make expense reports not suck.
Last month we announced Amex Corporate Card Reconciliation and received a huge enthusiastic response from our users. Due to the popularity of the feature and user demand, we have expanded Corporate Card Reconciliation to many more major banks.
