"Sorry" page

This static page is a fallback to route traffic to, in the event of an outage or serious app problem during a Challenge.

It should have no asset dependencies except font & component ones loaded from an external CDN endpoint, which should be available by virtue of components being npm-published, and not reliant on any Big Give infrastructure.

It is permanently available at the CloudFront-fronted endpoint https://sorry.thebiggive.org.uk for testing. It is also registered as an origin, normally unused, in the live Donate frontend CloudFront distribution (ID E3M8692L2XFBZY).

Recommended failover method

Because donate. already points to a CloudFront distribution, we cannot reroute to another at DNS level seamlessly, as only one distribution can be configured to support a given CNAME. To keep the CloudFront changes as narrow in scope as possible, there is already a Sorry static S3 site Origin set up on the Donate distributions - it is named sorry-s3.

Remember that if the underlying issue is brief, doing this may increase the site’s downtime by up to 30 minutes for some donors. Use with caution!

To switch donate. main traffic that would normally go through the ALB and on to the ECS cluster over to the Sorry page:

• in the Production Distribution's main Settings, enter sorry.html as the Default root object.
• go to the Production Distribution > Behaviors
• in the Default (*) Behavior in the AWS Console, manually change the origin from donate-alb-ecs to sorry-s3.

Note that S3 website hosting is turned off since users don’t interact with S3 directly.

Updating the page

You can edit the messaging in sorry.html and manually upload it to this bucket, making sure to enable public read access.

Be sure to commit and push your changes to this repository.

Alternative failover method

Switching to another distribution with DNS requires slow changes with more risk of outage vs. the recommended method above, because multiple CloudFront distributions cannot support the same hostname at once.

So it is not recommended to attempt to failover using DNS.

If for some reason you have no other option, you can still do so, and point to the Sorry CloudFront distribution normally used only for testing the sorry page content.

That distribution is also configured to serve any would-be-404 - i.e. any request except for /sorry.html - with that page and a 200 status code. See Error Pages in its settings.