Our apologies for the unexpected downtime today. What follows is a technical service update for those of you who are interested.

At approximately 3:00pm ET, we were notified by a log service on one of the database servers that one of the drives was experiencing sudden, unexpected failures. In an attempt to recover the drive, it failed at 4:30pm ET.

It was not a catastrophic failure, however, so we were able to make an additional backup of the most recent data from all forums (otherwise the data would've come from a 4-day old backup). This took about an hour.

We then shutdown the server and replaced the faulty drive. A full OS reinstall took about 2 hours, and the restore of all backup data and cleaning of the database tables took about another hour and a half.

As you know, we take our uptime here very seriously and worked immediately on resolving this issue as soon as the drive started failing. Given the way it failed, we were fortunate to not suffer from any data loss.

We are back up and running 100%. Please let me know if you notice any problems or unexpected errors on the forums. Thank you.

Again, we apologize for the unexpected downtime and appreciated your patience.

Best,
DocJohn