Problem

On 2026-07-23T10:53:00Z, identity document scanning in Mews Operations began failing intermittently. Approximately half of scan attempts returned an error, while the other half succeeded normally. The issue affected hotel staff scanning guest identity documents (passports, IDs) during check-in.

Action

We immediately investigated the issue and identified that the third-party service processing document images was rejecting some of our requests. We published a Statuspage update within 20 minutes advising customers that retrying a failed scan would typically succeed after one or two attempts, and that manual entry of document details remained available throughout.

Our team worked to diagnose the root cause, confirming the issue was not related to any Mews code release or configuration change. The service recovered fully by 2026-07-23T16:35:00Z.

Causes

The third-party service that processes document images intermittently blocked requests from our infrastructure, treating them as automated traffic. This was not caused by exceeding any usage limits — our usage was well within normal thresholds. The blocking occurred at the provider's network edge layer rather than at the API service level, which is why it affected only a portion of requests.

Solutions

The issue resolved on its own after approximately five and a half hours. No customer data was lost, and the vast majority of affected users (93%) were able to complete their scans successfully by retrying.

To prevent recurrence, we are taking the following steps:

1. Establishing a direct support relationship with the provider so we can escalate issues more quickly in the future
2. Evaluating alternative document processing providers to reduce our dependency on a single third party

We apologise for the inconvenience caused to hotel staff who had to retry document scans during the affected period.