Tag: downtime

EBSQ Data Center Outage

If you visited EBSQ this afternoon (6 March 2013) you might have noticed things were sluggish, then spotty, then completely down. We’ve discovered the problem isn’t on our end, but rather at our Data Center, where their network is completely down. They’re working to correct the problem now.  Thanks for your patience!

 

10pm EST The good news is that the problem has been diagnosed by the good folks at our data center. The bad news is that the replacement part the data center needs to get their customers (including EBSQ) back online will not be available until tomorrow morning.  It’s been a long frustrating day, and we appreciate that a solution is on its way.

Thanks  for hanging in there, folks. Once we’re back up, we’re looking forward to seeing all of the new art created during our rather unexpected downtime!

EBSQ is back online

9:12am EBSQ is currently down. We’re working with our server people to quickly resolve the problem. We’ll be updating this post with further information as it becomes available. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

10:18am Our current estimated uptime is no later than 11am EST. Thanks for your continued patience!

10:50am The issue has been resolved.

Update on EBSQ Downtime

I am pleased to announce that the data recovery effort is complete! We’re now working to put everything back together again and making sure everything more or less works, then getting our new server (currently in our office) to our new LOCAL data center.  We anticipate being back online by 9 October 2011 if all goes to plan. I want to thank everyone for their patience during this arduous process. We cannot wait to be back online and seeing what you all were up to creatively during the downtime.

Oh–one more note of interest: EBSQ email is now back online, so I’ve personally been trying to sort through 11 days of mail for the 4 different email addresses I help to manage.  We’ll get responses to those of you who wrote as soon as we can.

Huge cheers!

-Amie

Some updates for the week

We’re nearing the end of the data recovery process and hope to be back online within the next 48 hours.   We’ll update if/when that ETA changes.

In the interim, many of you have last month’s exhibits as well as October’s on the brain. Here’s what’s happening with these.

If you missed seeing the notice on our temporary homepage or our Facebook feed,  all September exhibits have been extended through mid-October.

Shows on tap for October are:

Think Pink, our annual Susan G Komen fundraiser. All entries must have a significant amount of pink the the composition. There’s a $10 entry fee per piece, payable to SGK. We’ll get the details on how to pay your entry fee soon.

Our annual Pet Portrait Swap is happening this month. Looking for a partner? Let us know in the comments to this post, or leave a note on our Facebook wall.

This month’s Flower of the Month is members of the gourd family, Cucurbitaceae. As you might have guessed based upon the name, cucumbers and zucchini are also welcome.

We’re postponing our juried Norse Mythology exhibit until 2012, likely January. More details will be forthcoming.

And lastly on a personal note, I miss you guys. I can’t wait to have us back up and running again and see all of the art that happened in the past week.

Thanks for your patience.  We know this past week has been a major inconvenience.

-Amie

Experiencing downtime (updated)

A few of our servers appear to be down. We’re looking into why now with our ISP. We hope to be back up and running shortly. Thanks for your patience!

Updated 1:29pm EDT: We’re dealing with 2 drive failures. Our data center is troubleshooting now and hope to have us back online shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience!

Updated 6:33pm EDT: We’re in data recovery mode. This will likely be a time-consuming process since we’re dealing with several hundred thousand images files. We’ll update as soon as we have more information available. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

Scheduled downtime for EBSQ Forum Upgrade

The EBSQ Forums are getting a much-needed make-over and a software upgrade. The forums will be offline starting 1:00pm EDT on Monday, 13 September 2010 and will go back online when the newest version of the full EBSQ website debuts.

Stay up to date with news by following us on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/ebsq

or by visiting our blog:  http://blog.ebsqart.com

See you on the other side!

Sorry about the EBSQ Downtime

Parking Chai..., er, FenceThis has to be my least favourite type of post.  Thanks to some tweets from you, I learned EBSQ was down before I even got into the office. A check of our logs shows we’d been down since 4:17am EST and a quick call to our Data Center confirmed they were having ongoing general network issues affecting all of their accounts. 

We’re now back up, but we wanted to apologize for the unplanned downtime all the same.  Thanks for saving a spot for us and enjoy the rest of your snow day with EBSQ!

Addendum to yesterday’s downtime

Part of yesterday’s downtime was due to a scheduled maintenance window at our Data Center. Part of it was due to a wide-spread network outage at the same Data Center during the aforementioned scheduled maintenance. According to the last tech I spoke with there, they’re still having some network issues so we may still yo-yo a bit. But the biggest current  issue is our email. While it’s not technically “down” right now, because of the system-wide problem at our data center, all of their email is essentially stuck. We have 100K messages in the spooler waiting for their turn in the queue to be delivered (can’t wait to get all that spam, lol!)

What this means for you:

If you’re waiting for a response from us,  it’s likely we haven’t gotten your message yet. We’re unable to send mail as well, so we can’t even respond to the messages we do have downloaded from our server. If you want/need technical assistance, your best bet is to go straight to the EBSQ Member Forums. You can also give us a tweet.

We’ve been assured that our mail *should* start showing up in droves sometime later today.  Once it arrives and is sorted, we’ll get to your questions and requests as soon as we can.  Thanks for your patience, folks!

Unexpected downtime

EBSQ was experiencing brief outages around 7 PM and is now completely down. We’ve learned this is part of a larger issue at our data center.  We hope to have this issue resolved ASAP and we’ll update this post as we learn more.

Hopefully you’re off enjoying a lovely Saturday evening and will be reading this post in retrospect. 

Thanks for your patience!

Edited 10:39 pm EST  We’re back up! Again, thanks for your patience.

Edited 11:42 pm EST Our Data Center is doing maintenance so there may be some continued yo-yo connectivity into the wee hours. We hope to be back up to full steam tomorrow morning. See you on the other side!

EBSQ Scheduled Maintenance

EBSQ is doing  scheduled maintenance on our servers. The site is now in read-only mode and the forums are currently unavailable. This means no art uploads/COA generation and periods of brief downtime as a result.  We should be back up to full-speed around noon Eastern Time, and we’ll let you know if this time estimate changes.

Thanks for your patience; we’ll see you on the other side!

Update 9:17 am EST: EBSQ forums are back up, we’re now working to correct our RSS feeds, most of which are showing in reverse!

Update 9:32 am EST: Site search, uploads, and COA management is still unavailable. We’re working to have that back online ASAP.

Update 10:28 am EST : Art uploads are enabled again, but not cycling through the Freshest Art RSS feed. If it’s important to you that your work be seen on the front page and your upload isn’t time sensitive, you might want to wait. Otherwise, upload away!

Update 10:43 am EST: Whoops, I misspoke. NOW the forums are back up. They were back online but somebody (and I’m not admitting its actually me) kinda forgot to turn them back on so that the rest of you can post.  Yeah, that was my bad. Sorry, guys!

Update 2:00 pm EST: All systems *should* be functioning normally. Please drop us a line if you find anything not working as expected and we’ll send in an exterminator to squash the bugs.  Thanks all!

EBSQ Server Migration and Support Holiday Hours

Merry Christmas from EBSQ!
Two little reindeer (EBSQ kiddos Abbey & Liam) wish you a very Merry Christmas!

EBSQ will be migrating to shiny new servers on Saturday, 26 December 2009 starting at Noon Eastern Standard Time. The current estimated total downtime is between 1 & 2 hours. We picked a weekend we hoped you all would have other plans, so hopefully we chose well! You can stay posted on our progress by following us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EBSQ

And one more service-related note: Customer Service  and Tech Support will be limited on Christmas Eve and closed on Christmas Day so our staff can spend the day with their families (and try not to eat all of the Christmas cookies!). If you have a general question, you’re always welcome to stop by our member forums. It’s likely some clueful person will be about to help if they can!

From all of us here at EBSQ, we wish you a safe and Happy Holiday Season and an Artful New Year!

-Amie, Bill, Melissa, Kris Jean, & Natasha

Downtime aka I dont like Mondays

We’ve been experiencing connectivity issues since yesterday and full-blown downtime for all of our servers since ~7am EST today. We have just learned this is the result of a network outage at our ISP. We have been given no ETA on when we’ll be back up. Sorry for the rotten start to your week, folks.  Hope to see you back online soon!

-Amie on behalf of Team EBSQ

FYI: Server Maintenance Window thru 8am

from our ISP:

During the evening of Friday, January 23rd starting at 8:00pm Eastern Time through the early morning of Saturday, January 24th ending at 8:00 am Eastern Time we will be performing system wide maintenance.

This will involve upgrading and patching servers which will require the occasional restart of each server. Web and email services may be unavailable for a few minutes at a time during a server restart during this maintenance period.

We’re not anticipating any significant downtime. Thanks for your patience!