Issue Summary: On Wednesday 21st January 2026, at approximately 0803 ET, we became aware that for some users, Apricot Intake Form links were either unresponsive or very slow to respond. This prevented affected users from submitting Intake Forms. After investigation and remediation of a bottleneck, normal service resumed at approximately 0930 ET.
Root Cause: Analysis showed that at 0800 ET, Intake Form traffic spiked to between 10 and 50 times historically normal levels causing the infrastructure handling those forms, to quickly become overwhelmed and slow down considerably. The kinds of levels the traffic scaled to, and the speed at which it did, was unprecedented. Manual intervention was required and when sufficient capacity was freed up, normal service resumed.
Prevention: Auto-scaling on the Intake Portal servers had not been enabled, primarily due to the relative stability of traffic historically and the fact that it was not possible to deploy concurrent version of the application. This concurrency limitation has now been fixed, and we will shortly be implementing auto-scaling measures to prevent such issues recurring.