At the end of March, the loan origination system for Ellie Mae (ELLI) stopped working. The outage took place on March 31, just as lenders were trying to finish closing their loans for the month.
The outage of Encompass360, Ellie Mae’s LOS, was originally thought to be the result of cyber attack. Not so much, the company said on Monday.
The company, a leading provider of on-demand automated solutions for the residential mortgage industry, announced that after investigating the outage, it determined that the cause of the outage was not a malicious attack but rather due to a “confluence of factors involving network, hardware, software and demand for service.”
The company initially said that the characteristics of the outage appeared to the consistent with a distributed denial of service attack. Now the company’s CEO is apologizing to its clients.
“We are pleased to confirm there was no breach of client or borrower data,” Sig Anderman, CEO and founder of Ellie Mae, said. “We sincerely apologize to our clients and any affected borrowers for the unavailability of Encompass services during the outage, and thank them for their patience and understanding as we worked to bring the system back to normal functioning levels.”
In the wake of Encompass360’s crash, it left some wondering if the outage was the work of cyber terrorists. The New York Department of Financial Services had also begun surveying its members to determine what, if any, impact the outage caused. It now appears that all of the concern was for naught.
The company says that is has already taken a “number of steps in response to this incident, including adding capacity and redistributing traffic across its data centers.” The company notes that its IT infrastructure has been functioning normally since mid-afternoon on April 1.
Ellie Mae’s Encompass360 platform currently services 20% of all residential mortgages in the United States, and 90,000 mortgage professionals use the Ellie Mae technology to originate and fund loans.
Anderman added, “We are focused on continuing to enhance our systems to deliver the functionality, reliability and scalability our clients need to run their businesses, remain compliant and originate high quality loans efficiently.”
