I always got a chuckle out of the joke that StackOverflow devs must be the best devs because when StackOverflow goes down, they don't have StackOverflow to look at for answers, haha.
"Those who most need coffee are the least qualified to brew it." -- me, after forgetting to put the pot under the filter when attempting to make coffee in the office.
DNS should have a mechanism for designating failover IPs, so you could e.g. host a static HTML saying "it's down" on some CDN as far as possible topologically from the rest of your network, so it displays when your status page is down too.
However, status pages are first and foremost marketing tools, so I wouldn't expect anyone setting such mechanism up.
Yeah. There was someone a few years ago who said something like, "If your website doesn't have a status page, it does have one on Twitter". Wish I could find the quote source.
Likely it's hosted on the same infrastructure. The general recommendation is to host the status page on different provider so it's more likely to stay up.
Start time: June 15, 2023 | 9:00pm
End time: June 15, 2023 | 10:00pm
We are performing a software upgrade
on network equipment that will cause
some traffic to be dropped for about
1 minute, during the device restart.
I wonder which time zone. No idea where they are in the USA.
They did not discountinue it. They are uploading June data dump and it's expected that the automatic data dumps are re-enabled by end of day Friday: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/390200
One unexpected benefit of LLM (to me) is that it memorized large parts of the internet, so it has some backup like properties. SO is down, but ChatGPT memorized it already.
memorized SO, also known as "stole". when i (and everyone else) write for SO, i give them permission to use what i write, but never did I sign up for the GPT theft of that data.
Yeah definitely. My default thought process was always, ok I'll just get a cached version, but now it's like - lemme see what GPT-4 thinks about this problem first.
One day ALL websites will go down worldwide and stay down. Could be today, could be 50 years in the future. Make sure you have a LOT of books you look forward to reading. "The Road" is not just a parable.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed a significant drop in stackoverflow results when I Google in the recent months. Can’t really attribute it to anything, but an honest word sometimes I don’t use SO for weeks.
Sometimes your separated infrastructure is not as separate as you think. True story. Northwest Airlines (prior to merger with Delta) was grounded for a couple of days in the 90's due to a backhoe cutting through their data and communication lines about 300 yards from their control center. Both vendors were using the same utility right of way. So separate systems, separate vendors, separate cables buried in the ground next to each other. One backhoe operator took them both out.
Looks like they use FireHydrant (https://firehydrant.com/) for their status page. But if FireHydrant is having issues, they'd need Stack Overflow. It's a terrible coincidence.
Readit News
Create a static status page on yourserver.com/status.html and write:
If you can't read this, it means the status of yourserver.com is: DOWN
However, status pages are first and foremost marketing tools, so I wouldn't expect anyone setting such mechanism up.
Deleted Comment
https://twitter.com/StackStatus/status/1575844926884962305?s...
The old status page https://stackstatus.tumblr.com is up, but not updated.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/maintenance+...
> The downtime we just experienced wasn't related to this maintenance. We'll be posting the details shortly.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/10/20/introducing-the-overfl...
https://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/stackoverflow....
https://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/stackoverflow....
You would definitely be an elite at your job for situations like this...
Probably not for long. They've already discontinued the public data dump: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389922/june-2023-da...
That's unfortunate. At least you can still get May's dump which has plenty of material.
Many many projects host on readthedocs.com. So that's another major failure point.
memorized SO, also known as "stole". when i (and everyone else) write for SO, i give them permission to use what i write, but never did I sign up for the GPT theft of that data.
Although, I mean that more in the sense we can have an entire (text) internet search engine on a phone, rather than it being a full backup.
https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
Sometimes your separated infrastructure is not as separate as you think. True story. Northwest Airlines (prior to merger with Delta) was grounded for a couple of days in the 90's due to a backhoe cutting through their data and communication lines about 300 yards from their control center. Both vendors were using the same utility right of way. So separate systems, separate vendors, separate cables buried in the ground next to each other. One backhoe operator took them both out.