Tag: downtime

Facebook is dead

facebook is dead

Now that’s something you don’t see every day: the whole of Facebook is down – the website, the APIs, the social buttons, etc.

Oh, and I think they need to update the copyright year on this page.

Jokes from the office folks:

How many “f*cks” per second do you think one could hear in the Facebook office right now?

The productivity of the whole world just spiked!

Fun stuff from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TheUniBibIe/status/479539283226017793

Gmail glitch – an example to follow

Once again Google demonstrates the proper way to handle issues.  Due to their software update, some users temporary lost access to emails.  Instead of hiding and silencing, Google published a blog post explaining the issue, as well where and when more information would be available.  Not to mention that loss of service is an extremely rare occasion, and loss of data is even more so.  This time, it seems, all data is recoverable from tape backups.  All it takes is a little time.

Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.

In times like that, keeping your users up to date is vital.  All the press releases and marketing newsletters in the world won’t buy you a fraction of the trust that a simple blog post during the downtime will bring you.

Out of disk space

Last night the server ran out of disk space while doing a backup.  That affected most of the sites and some services hosted on this server.   I have cleaned up some space since, and made sure that there will be enough of it for the backups to run.  I’ll also keep an eye on it to see if there was some other problem hiding behind the disk space issue.

Apologies to everyone who was affected.

Hosting downtime

None of the sites hosted on my sever were accessible for most of yesterday.  That was caused by some emergency maintenace done by the hosting company.  They didn’t warn me before, so I weren’t aware of it coming and for how long it would last.

This is the third downtime for this month.  Needless to say, I am not satisfied with the service no more.  Firstly, the downtimes are too frequent and too lengthy.  Secondly, total absense of notificatios – either before the downtime or after.  No explanations.  Nothing.

I’ve been with this hosting company for more than two years now and it was OK most of the time.  But now, once again, I am thinking about moving somewhere else.   Suggestions?

Downtime, with database error

Apologies to those of you who noticed a brief downtime last night.  My hosting company was moving the database from one IP address to another, and they have warned me about it a few times early on the way.  All I had was to update configuration of the blog, but somehow that slipped through my memory.  Once I noticed the problem, it was trivial to fix.  Everything is back and should be working just fine now.

This blog wasn’t the only one affected – I’m hosting quite a few  web sites, and most of them had the same problem.  As far as I can see, all of them are up now.  Let me know if you notice that something is still broken.