Having trouble sending mail to aol.com? (resolved)

The aol.com mail servers have been having problems for the last 24 hours, according to the AOL blog and the AOL Twitter feed.

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Brief scheduled maintenance on flexo server (completed)

At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, October 23, the “flexo” Web server will be restarted.

As a result, for customers on the “flexo” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.

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Brief scheduled maintenance Friday, September 24 (completed)

Between 11:00 PM and 11:30 PM Pacific time this Friday, September 24, some of our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, some customers will find that Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.

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High load on some servers (resolved)

Three of our Web hosting servers (amy, flexo, and leela) experienced high load earlier today that caused some customers to see “503 errors” on their Web sites for a few minutes.

This was caused by an upgrade to the eAccelerator PHP caching system that removed all the cached files at once, which doesn’t normally happen.

The problem has been permanently resolved and will not recur.

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Brief scheduled maintenance Saturday, August 28 (completed)

Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday, August 28, all our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.

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Comcast network problems August 12 (resolved)

Our monitoring systems are showing that some people who reach our servers via an “Internet backbone” company called Global Crossing, including some Comcast cable customers, have been intermittently unable to connect over the last hour or so.

This isn’t an outage on our end; these visitors are also unable to reach other sites that Comcast routes through Global Crossing (and not related to us), such as www.globalcrossing.com. It’s something Comcast and Global Crossing need to address.

We’ll continue to monitor this issue closely and post an update when we’re confident that it’s been resolved.

By the way, if you ever find that you’re unable to connect to our servers (or anyone else’s), a very useful site is CheckSite.us. It shows you whether the destination servers are down, or whether the problem is just a local routing problem that isn’t affecting most other people.

Update 9 AM PDT August 13: According to our monitoring systems, Comcast resolved this shortly after our post, and the problem has not recurred in the ten hours since then.

Brief scheduled maintenance Monday, August 2 on some servers (completed)

Between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time tonight (Monday August 2), several of our hosting servers will be restarted: bender, elzar, farnsworth, lrrr, mom, and seymour.

As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail for some customers will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.

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Brief maintenance on calculon server (completed)

The “calculon” Web server will be restarted at 9 PM Pacific time tonight (July 5). This will cause a five-minute interruption of Web and e-mail service for customers on that server.

Other servers will not be affected, and incoming mail will only be delayed, not lost.

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Brief scheduled maintenance Saturday, May 22 (completed)

Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time this Saturday, May 22, all our hosting servers will be restarted. As a result, Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes at some point during this maintenance “window”.

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Network issues (resolved)

We’re receiving reports of network connectivity problems from a couple of customers using the “Global Crossing” Internet backbone to reach our primary data center, although most customers are unaffected. We’re investigating this issue.

Update 12:35 PM: Our upstream provider reports that an 8 minute network interruption for some connections, beginning at 11:11 AM Pacific time, was caused by a router failure at Global Crossing. The problem has been resolved.