Ellie Mae (ELLI) drove the industry to the brink Monday and Tuesday after its loan origination system Encompass 360 shut down for users, halting all closing processes.
Then factor in that it was the end of the month—an extra busy time for lenders—and the market almost lost it.
Ellie Mae released a statement Tuesday that said service outage today is "consistent with an external malicious attack characteristic of a distributed denial of service.”
And the nasty side effect: the company's software could not close mortgages during the outage.
“We recognize the critical role our services play in enabling our clients to serve their customers and deeply regret the inconvenience and delays they are experiencing," said Sig Anderman, founder and CEO of Ellie Mae.
"The performance and security of our platform is our number one priority," he added.
"We are doing everything within our power to restore full operations as soon as possible."
@Encompass360 If this is origination software, does this hold up my Buyer's loan from bring funded for a closing? Waiting since yest. AM.
— Kira Kirk (@kirakirk) April 1, 2014
@Encompass360 has the cause of the problem been identified and if so do we have an ETA on the servers going back up? 2 days is quite a while
— John Hackett (@johndraper34) April 1, 2014
And as of 5:45 p.m. PST on Tuesday, the site was up and running. But not before creating several hiccups along the way.
@Encompass360 hi! do you think service will be restored soon? We are up against a wall with closing soon!
— Verle (@juniorv130) April 1, 2014
Dear @Encompass360 : still not fixed. This matter is kind of urgent for anyone trying to work on a Home Loan.
— Admiral Akbro (@milesdfarmer) April 1, 2014
Having a strong uptime percentage is critical to the fundamentals of mortgage lending, Dominic lannitti, CEO of DocMagic, emphasized.
DocMagic said that it usually has an uptime between 99.99% and 99.999%, which is up kept by proprietary system that sends complete transaction requests of all types through the system continuously.
“As these requests flow through the system, company technicians monitor over 1000 data points that impact service delivery and quality. Any potential problems are identified and addressed before they can escalate and pose a risk to the entire system,” DocMagic stated.
Encompass360 was down for two days and currently 20% of all residential mortgages in the U.S. flow through its software, along with 90,000 mortgage professionals using the Ellie Mae technology to originate and fund quality and compliant loans with efficiency.
And you don’t have to look too much further than the twitter page to see the aftermath.
@Encompass360 any ETA on a fix? Hoping/praying to wake up to a working system tomorrow.
— Justin Girolimon (@JGirolimon) April 1, 2014
@Encompass360 Please get these connectivity issues sorted out! We can't have service outages at the end of the month like this!
— Wesley Kinslow (@wedgeex) March 31, 2014
However, I will note, as active as people were on Ellie Mae’s twitter, so was Ellie Mae.
A Message from Jonathan Corr: As you are probably aware, Ellie Mae is experiencing an issue with Encompass that… http://t.co/fvHz455DCZ
— Ellie Mae (@Encompass360) April 1, 2014
