City of Ottawa fall recreation signups start Wednesday after website glitch resolved

The city of Ottawa has announced the new date for signups to fall recreation programs after a glitch during swimming lesson registrations last week delayed other programs.

The new ACTIVENet platform the city uses for online registrations crashed Aug. 14 as thousands were trying to sign up.

Following that incident, the city said it was postponing other registrations until the issue was resolved. Signups were supposed to begin last Wednesday.

The city now says registrations for fall non-aquatic recreation programs and PA days will begin online on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and in-person on Thursday.

"The City’s service provider has resolved the technical issues experienced on Monday, August 14 with the registration service. We continue to work with the vendor to monitor the service and ensure our residents have a positive experience," the city said in a news release Monday. 

A memo to city councillors said that a software update caused the issue last week.

"Following ongoing investigations and testing, the vendor ACTIVENet has advised that the cause of the disruption that occurred during aquatic registration on Monday, August 14 was from a planned software update that negatively impacted the hardware responsible for balancing the high volume of transactions during peak registration across available servers," said Recreation, Cultural and Facility Services General Manager Dan Chenier. "Subsequently, the service was impaired for a short time resulting in poor performance. The issue has now been resolved."

The ACTIVENet system was supposed to be the solution to the problems of lengthy delays, crashes, and other issues residents experienced every signup period of things like swimming lessons and other city-run activities. The new system launched late last year, promising a "modern alternative that will have greater capacity to serve high volumes of concurrent users," according to city staff. It hit a snag last Monday night during fall aquatic registration. The city said a temporary solution resolved the issue at around 9:40 p.m. and allowed about 25,000 people to register by 11 p.m. The city later postponed non-aquatic registration until the problem that caused Monday's glitch was resolved.

Chenier said that the city's previous registration program could only handle 450 concurrent users at a time, leading to lengthy waits, but ACTIVENet has promised that the glitch last week is not reflective of its ability to handle future signups.

"This has been demonstrated for winter, spring and summer registrations. The City is confident the ACTIVENet service has sufficient server capacity to support our high volume of registrations," Chenier said.

Registration for aquatic programs and before and after school programs is open and ongoing.

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