Tuesday, January 13, 2009

I didn't do it... Ancestry and Rootsweb are down right now

I received an email today from Ancestry.com that said:

" I just wanted to let you know that Ancestry.com has been experiencing some server difficulties over the past couple of days. Our IT team is working to isolate and, once isolated, solve the problem. The issues have not allowed users to access Ancestry.com at certain times of the day.

"I’ll continue to keep you updated as the IT team works to figure out these performance issues. The Ancestry.com blog, at
http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/, will also continue to be updated."

I just want everyone to know that "we who visited there didn't have anything to do with this. We were watched very closely on Friday as we walked respectfully along the row of server racks with lots of cables on the back side and lots of blinking lights on the front sides. As we walked along one row, I said "look, there's my family tree - right there on that server." Everyone cracked up, and one of the Ancestry guys said "how did you know?" I didn't answer, but I should have said "because the red light flashing means that data is unsourced."

I checked http://www.ancestry.com/ and http://www.rootsweb.com/ in the last five minutes and both are down. I hope they come back soon. http://www.genealogy.com/ and http://www.myfamily.com/ are up and running.

When we were there on Friday, they claimed that Ancestry.com had a 99.91% uptime percentage. That 0.09% downtime rate is 1.3 minutes per day on average, and a total of less than 8 hours per year. This downtime period is definitely going to hurt that uptime average.

On Facebook, Cindy noted that Ancestry was down from 1 PM CST - so that's almost four hours by now (I'm typing this at 3 p.m. PST).

I appreciate the notification of the problem. It is another indication that Ancestry.com wants to keep their users informed about issues like this.

UPDATE 8 p.m.: Ancestry.com came back for me after 3 p.m. Rootsweb is still down at 8 p.m. Watch the Ancestry.com Blog for more updates.

1 comment:

TERRY SNYDER said...

I'm not buyin' in. Seaver near a server and suddenly Ancestry and Rootweb both experience problems! Very interesting, possibly some kind of "magnetic" charm? :)