[Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24

Tim Starling tstarling at wikimedia.org
Wed May 25 07:56:44 UTC 2011


On 25/05/11 17:32, FT2 wrote:
> I don't get this.
> 
> Would it be possible in future, if the sites are unresponsive, or will be
> unresponsive due to planned maintenance, to establish a fallback that simply
> displays an explanatory status message to the public?

You mean replace the entire site with an error page? But only part of
the site was down. More and more things became accessible as each
database server was fixed. I'm not sure how this could work.

Even if we did prepare an error message saying "Wikipedia will be down
for 2 minutes while a router restarts", I don't think that could be
called "explanatory" if it were displayed for half an hour.

Writing informative error messages and displaying them in appropriate
places is necessarily a low-priority task during downtime, the higher
priority task being to get the site working again. Maybe at some time
in the future, we will have enough 24/7 sysadmin manpower that we can
respond to any unplanned downtime in the way you suggest. But we don't
have that capability just yet.

-- Tim Starling




More information about the foundation-l mailing list