On 19 January 2012 09:12, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
On 19/01/12 01:10, Thomas Dalton wrote:
The sites have gone down accidentally on numerous occasions and any user trying to access them just got an error message. The world didn't seem to end on any of those occasions...
There is a difference between accidentally breaking the site and pulling the plug on purpose. We had outages of several hours, but unless the blackout, the sysadmins were working on fixing it since they learned about it. Plus, I think you would need to go to the early days of Wikipedia to find an outage where it was unavailable for so long.
No, there isn't a difference. A blackout where everyone sees a page with a particular message instead of the article they wanted is exactly the same as unscheduled downtime where everyone sees a page with a particular message instead of the article they wanted. If search engines and caches can survive one of them, they can survive both, since they are identical from an external perspective.