Brief MySQL scheduled maintenance April 29 & 30, 2017 for some servers (completed)

We’re beginning the process of upgrading our MySQL database servers from the 5.5 series to the MySQL 5.6 series (specifically, from version 5.5.54 to 5.6.36).

The upgrade requires that each Web server be taken offline for approximately 60 seconds, causing brief scheduled “downtime”.

This coming weekend, we’ll be updating some (but not all) web servers:

• Saturday, April 29, 8-10 AM Pacific: servers ending in digits “9” and “8” (completed)
• Sunday, April 30, 8-10 AM Pacific: servers ending in digits “7” and “6” (completed)

(Servers ending in digits 0-5 will be updated the following weekend; we’ll post a separate announcement about that.)

So, for example, the “web08” server will be updated on April 29, and the “web06” server will be updated on April 30. This page explains how to find which server a site is on.

Although each server’s upgrade will happen at some point between 8 AM and 10 AM Pacific time, the Web server will only be unavailable for about a minute at some point during that period, not the whole time.

We’ll post a banner on all the pages of our site while the maintenance is happening. E-mail service will not be interrupted in any way.

We apologize for the inconvenience this causes. We try to avoid any interruption in service, but the MySQL upgrade cannot be done without brief downtime.

After the upgrade, customers should notice no difference in how their site works. Any software that worked properly with MySQL 5.5.54 should work the same with MySQL 5.6.36.