As you can imagine here at Teachers’ Pensions, to deal with the amount of employers we do, we need a large scale system to be able to store and amend member’s details. With any large scale system, issues can occasionally occur causing errors for those using it. In most cases the issue can be easily identified and quickly rectified, but in some cases the issues can take longer to fix.

Towards the end of July a few of you told us you’d been experiencing problems with Concurrent Logins on the Employer Portal (you’d received a message saying you couldn’t log in as you were already logged in), which required you to log out and log back in.

Our IT support team picked this up, but struggled to find the problem as the issue appeared random with no similarities in the issues you were experiencing, other than the error message and subsequent Concurrent Login notification. Our team set up automated tests to try and replicate what was happening but were unable to, so we had to ask for more information.

Often when you report issues we ask which web browser you’re using. It’s important to try to complete your work from different browsers, computers and even networks when investigating issues like this, to try and determine what is causing the issue, and our request that you do this in no way implies user error. By trying these different combinations it allows us to rule out potential issues such as browser version and configuration, malicious or conflicting computer software (like anti-virus scanners) and bespoke and dynamic network configurations.

In this particular case we needed information about the cookies your web browser uses to identify you as an individual.

The cookies are used to assess your activity when using our website to help us provide the best service possible. If there are issues with your cookies it’ll cause you to get logged out because the website can’t validate you.

We hoped that when we compared the cookies between when the website was working as intended and when it presented the error message, it would give us what we needed to identify the issue.

Details of what we needed were sent those of you who were affected along with a full explanation on how to find it, and those of you involved went out of your way to locate the information we asked for which we’re very thankful for as it gave our team the answers they needed.

We’d like to use this as an example of great team work between you and us in order to identify and resolve a complex issue and hopefully prevent something similar from arising in the future.