Engineering

I've been building the GABLVM iOS app for a while now, and for weeks I had this annoying thing happening. I'd be in the Learn tab, double tap Play on a dua or a phrase from a lesson, the recording would start fine, and about a second later VoiceOver would just dump me on the Back button. Not every time I touched the app. Just when I started a recording. I'd swipe back down, find my place, keep going. I honestly figured it was my phone doing something weird, so I didn't even write it down.

On June 26, 2026, we shipped an update meant to make the Quran player work better with the JAWS screen reader on Windows. It did. It also, without us noticing, switched off the player's single key keyboard shortcuts for anyone whose focus was on the player's own controls, and they stayed off for seven weeks. Accessibility is the reason this organization exists, so when we get it wrong in the very act of trying to get it right, you deserve the full story. No data was affected and playback itself never stopped working.

On the night of July 11, gablvm.org went down and stayed down for twelve hours and forty-one minutes. That is the longest outage in this site's history, and you deserve a straight account of what happened, why our own monitoring took ten hours to notice, and what has already changed so it cannot repeat. No visitor data was ever at risk. This was an availability failure, not a security event.

In March 2026, GABLVM services experienced two unplanned outages caused by infrastructure issues at our hosting provider. This post explains what happened, what caused both incidents, and what we have done to permanently resolve them.

On February 11, 2026, a community member reported that prayer times were showing incorrect results for their city. What started as a single bug report uncovered three compounding bugs that had likely been present since the prayer times feature launched in November 2025. Over the next three days, our team shipped 7 bug fixes, 2 performance optimizations, and 6 accessibility improvements.

This is our first engineering blog post. We believe in transparency — when something breaks, we want to explain what happened, why, and what we learned.