Website outage, Saturday 26/03/2022

Website outage, Saturday afternoon.

The Lavinia Stamps website was unavailable for some 40 minutes on Saturday due to a misconfiguration of our web hosting company’s SSL status.

We were not hacked and at no time was any data compromised. The issue was resolved within 20 minutes of us contacting the web host.

We were not hacked and at no time was any data compromised.

An SSL certificate is a device that adds an extra layer of security by encrypting website traffic and appending that reassuring HTTPS to the web address.  

Think of it as being a security guard standing outside a building. Our old security guard retired on Saturday and the new one failed to turn up because he’d been given the wrong address.

So, rather than leave the building unattended, the door was automatically locked.

Unfortunately, when a web browser cannot verify a certificate, it displays that over-the-top scary warning about hackers stealing information.

We would like to apologise for any inconvenience this caused and thank those of you who sent messages alerting us. This enabled us to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.

Regardless of any of the above, you can also be reassured by the fact no customers’ financial information is stored, neither on our website or our premises.