Today at approximately 1:40pm PST this web site along with all of Six Apart's web sites and services suffered a major interruption of service due to a power outage that affected our entire hosting facility. Power was restored to the facility by 4:00pm but it took several hours to restore all of our services to full capacity. But we are now back.
It was our intent to release a new version of Movable Type 4.0 today, but under the circumstances we decided to delay the release 24 hours. Looking on the bright side, however, this outage may have given us just enough time to close out some of the last remaining known issues in the application, and may very well have helped us to reach the important milestone of releasing our first official release candidate of Movable Type 4.0.
So as we work through the night to verify the most recent builds, we will be going through the usual process of updating the change log and our list of known issues. We will also be working on compiling our final set of release notes to provide users with as much knowledge and information about the upcoming release as we can.
Before we sign off for the evening, I wanted to thank all of our users for their patience, support and understanding through this very trying day. And finally, I wanted to send a special shout out to all of the Six Apart ops personnel, as well as all of the system administrators who have been working tirelessly to restore services to some of the Internet's most beloved web sites, blogs and services affected by this outage. Thank you!
It was our intent to release a new version of Movable Type 4.0 today, but under the circumstances we decided to delay the release 24 hours. Looking on the bright side, however, this outage may have given us just enough time to close out some of the last remaining known issues in the application, and may very well have helped us to reach the important milestone of releasing our first official release candidate of Movable Type 4.0.
So as we work through the night to verify the most recent builds, we will be going through the usual process of updating the change log and our list of known issues. We will also be working on compiling our final set of release notes to provide users with as much knowledge and information about the upcoming release as we can.
Before we sign off for the evening, I wanted to thank all of our users for their patience, support and understanding through this very trying day. And finally, I wanted to send a special shout out to all of the Six Apart ops personnel, as well as all of the system administrators who have been working tirelessly to restore services to some of the Internet's most beloved web sites, blogs and services affected by this outage. Thank you!
Syca
July 25, 2007 7:35 AM | Reply
Welcome back. :)
I don't know if you guys noticed during this outage but I think before you move into RC you should re-think the dashboard "MT News" feed block. It seems that while you where down it would take ages for my dashboard to load. It would sit on a blank page as it tried to reach your server for that information. Once it timed out it would finally load.
Maybe it should be changed so that it either loads last, or uses an iframe or something that would load it seperatly from the dashboard just in case this happens again. Not saying that it will, but just my 2 cents.
Byrne Reese
July 25, 2007 9:45 AM | Reply
A number of users have notified us of this issue. I am working with the engineering team to see what we can do to help inform users how to address the problem should it occur again.
As it turns out there is an MT configuration directive that can be placed in your mt-config.cgi file called "HTTPTimeout" that controls how long the app will wait before giving up on trying to load the News Feed. Setting it to "HTTPTimeout 3" for example will help speed up the app during a Six Apart outage (which we will work exceptionally hard to keep from happening again and affecting users).