MapForums

My ISP reports on the outage that affected mapforums.com yesterday --

Greetings,

As you know, there was approximately 4 hours of network downtime earlier this afternoon. This was an unfortunate event and the cause of much frustration all around. For those of you who have been long-term loyal customers, you know that this event was unlike anything that we've experienced in several years. Regardless, we fully understand how difficult these things can be.

The problem started when one of the main electrical panels at Atlantanap popped. This panel was located between the backup generator and the area of the data center that houses all of our servers. As such, the power outage was the initial cause of today's outage. Compounding the problem was that when the power was restored, one of the switches that goes to our servers didn't come back up. Technicians at the data center worked very quickly, although each minute seemed like an eternity, to replace the faulty hardware.

Today's outage has brought about some very structured communications between AxisHOST and our provider. Its been decided that there will be some additional measures put into place to ensure that this type of outage will have an almost impossible chance of ever happening again. Power backup units will be placed between the panels and our equipment as well as some other changes. We are going to work with our provider to examine any other possible weak links and address those as well. We expect to announce a small maintenance window (less than 15 minutes) next month. This will allow the power backup solution to be put into place. The downtime will be only long enough to shut down each server, plug it into the backup and then power it on again.

We sincerely apologize for the outage. I appreciate everyone's patience and kind words of encouragement throughout the day today.

Thank you.