Source: The Storque
Etsy will be offline for approximately 20 minutes at 2am EDT, on Thursday March 12. (tomorrow/tonight, depending on your time zone)
Follow this link to convert to your local time zone.
In this Storque article, Etsy admins chaddickerson and Vanessa announce not only upcoming site maintenance slated for January 26, but for all of 2009:
On Monday, January 26th from 2am EST until 6am EST*, we will be doing scheduled maintenance on Etsy’s systems. During this time period, all functions on the site will be unavailable and all Etsy users will be directed to a page that notes that the site is undergoing scheduled maintenance. For updates during the maintenance window, please see http://fix.etsy.com. (Note: Any sellers who have purchased a Showcase that would run during this maintenance window will receive a pro-rated credit for the 4-hour maintenance period.)
We have planned a number of behind-the-scenes changes and improvements for 2009 that will enhance the stability and scalability of the site but will require site downtime. To minimize the disruption to the community and allow all of you to plan as far in advance as possible, we have set maintenance window dates for the rest of 2009. Below are the planned dates (all times are 2-6am EST*):
- Monday, February 23
- Monday, March 30
- Monday, April 27
- Monday, May 25
- Monday, June 29
- Monday, July 27
- Monday, August 31
- Monday, September 28
- Monday, October 26
- Monday, November 23
- Monday, December 28
We will communicate these dates in advance each month as a reminder. While there may still be occasional emergency maintenance windows, our goal is to use these regular planned maintenance windows to proactively make changes that will minimize emergencies.
Please add your comments or concerns in this forum thread.
Thanks in advance for your patience during our site maintenance periods, and thanks for using Etsy!
*To translate 2am EST into your local time zone, please click here. For 6am EST, click here.
Source: http://fix.etsy.com/
Intermittent errors
10:30am EST: As noted in this forum thread, we are done with the server reboots.
9:30am EST: By “intermittent,” we meant problems for a few seconds, if you experienced an issue at all. We just wanted to let you know just in case!
9:01am EST: You may be experiencing intermittent errors on the site right now. We are working on it.
We are also posting updates in this forum thread: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5939800
This was posted on the morning of Jan 4th.
However just now, at approximately 11:39 PM EST, Etsy had a brief “hiccup” or downtime.
The page said to go to the fix.etsy.com site for more information, but that was down as well.
When Etsy came back up, so did fix.etsy.com.
update:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5980673&page=2
chaddickerson says:
We did have a network issue that affected access to the site for less than a minute. We are investigating.
Posted at 11:58 pm, January 3 2009 EST - Report this post
source:
http://fix.etsy.com/?p=437
Etsy experienced a short downtime today, Sunday Oct 26. It resulted in users getting a 500 server error or various other errors (a page full of code, etc).
It appears to be resolved now.
Etsy will be migrating their database to new hardware on Monday morning October 27, 2008, which will result in Etsy being down from 3am until 6am (eastern US time).
The Storque will also have some scheduled downtime this coming Sunday, for one hour. 11 pm-midnight.
Source: This Storque article
Etsy’s CTO Chad Dickerson said:
I’m just completing my seventh week as CTO here at Etsy, and the Engineering Team here is continuing to work on the infrastructure for the site, including putting in some new systems and processes in place that will make Etsy more reliable both for the holidays and for the long haul. Next weekend, we will be migrating Etsy’s master database to better and faster hardware. Since the master database contains the most essential information used to run Etsy, the key functions of the site will be unavailable. We have scheduled this maintenance for 3am until 6am ET on Monday, October 27, 2008. We will have a page up noting that we are in maintenance mode, but you will be unable to use search, listings, checkout, Storque, forums, convos, or anything else you normally use at Etsy. Because this is a significant migration, we wanted to give you plenty of advance notice.
This weekend, we will be taking the Storque database down for maintenance from 11pm-midnight on Sunday, October 19, 2008. Storque will be unavailable during this time.
You might notice that the maintenance window for the master database is 3 hours, whereas the maintenance window for the much smaller conversations database on September 22 was much longer (approximately 11 hours). This is not a coincidence, but very intentional and the result of better planning and execution. Since September 22, we have begun putting a more thoughtful and intelligent design in place for our database systems with the specific goal of shortening maintenance windows and any downtime you will experience. As we continue to work on Etsy, we will do whatever we can to minimize the disruption for all of you.
For both of these maintenance windows, we will be posting updates to fix.etsy.com.
Thanks for your patience as we continue to work to make Etsy better!
This announcement was also made via email if you are subscribed to the news alert emails. You can sign up for those here.
The entire Etsy site is down for the second time today. Although we’ve been told in the past to check the old Etsy blog at http://fix.etsy.com for updates in the case of site down time, nothing has been updated there for quite some time.
UPDATE: After being down for over half an hour, the site is back up, for now.
Matt closed this thread with the following information:
Hello,
We dropped the ball here, and I am sorry for it. We are making sure that this will not happen again.
Please stay tuned here: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5809148 for official word on the outage.Thanks, Matt
Matt begins the official thread (above) with the following post:
Friends,
Today at around 7:00 pm EDT, some visitors to Etsy were unable to access the site. We are now up and running again, and investigating exactly what happened. I wlll keep you updated here as news arises.
Thank you for your patience.
Matt
Some commenters in that thread point out that the outage was more like 45 minutes. Matt also apologized in another thread for the lack of updates at fix.etsy.com and says that they’ll try to make sure that an update is added next time.
UPDATE: Etsy has updated the blog at fix.etsy.com, and has removed all content except for this new post:
“Monday, September 15, 2008
It’s an unhappy day when Etsy goes down, and doubly unhappy when the site that’s supposed to give status updates on Etsy being down is having its own set of problems.
This is what we experienced today, and we’re sorry. We’re staying up late tonight to talk about what caused both mishaps, and what we can do to prevent them from happening again.
We’ll be posting more in our own forums, and revamping this status page, too.
- Chad, Maria, Rob, Matt and all us Etsy folk”
In this Storque article, jared announces another Etsy server upgrade, this time for the Treasury, Chat and Virtual Labs.
Good news! The Treasury, Chat Rooms, and Virtual Labs are getting a significant server upgrade. The change is being made to address a number of key performance issues caused by record high usage. If the old server was a Honda Insight, the new server is a Tesla Roadster. Yes, it’s quite fast.
In order to make the change, we are temporarily suspending the creation of new Treasury lists. This will allow all the current lists to naturally expire in about three days. After all lists have expired, the server change will take place. The change itself will only take a few moments. If all is successful, the creation of new Treasury lists will once again be enabled, and we can all enjoy the performance boost.
With the current expiration schedule, the server change is looking like it will take place early Sunday morning, August 3rd. The exact time may change.
The Chat Rooms and Virtual Labs will also be moved to the new server at the same time as the Treasury. Both applications will experience about 60 seconds of downtime. All user created Chat Rooms will need to be recreated.
Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Find the official Etsy companion thread here.
According to this Etsy thread, users of some ISP’s have been reporting connectivity issues to Etsy which are caused by Etsy moving their servers to a new data center. (These are the physical location of the server machines)
alternate link to Etsy thread if you cannot access Etsy
Rokali says:
Hi everyone,As people here have seen, this is a DNS issue. Anytime any changes to DNS are made, those changes have to propagate to servers around the world. This can take a bit of time.
We’re in the process of migrating from one data center to another (larger) data center. As part of this migration, we moved our DNS servers. This means they got a new IP address. (There are always at least two DNS servers, for redundancy, so it’s multiple IP addresses, and we set Primary, Secondary, Tertiary etc. status for each of them).
It’s these new IP addresses that needs to propagate. Being well aware of this, we kept our old DNS servers up & running, so as the new IP addresses propagated, even if people still hit the old IP addresses, it would work.
This did work, but we recently discovered an edge case, which causes problems. This edge case is a good example of how intertwined the Web is.
In order for Etsy not to be loading for you, the following three ingredients need to be in the recipe of how you connect to the site:
1. Your internet service provider (ISP) has been slow to update its own DNS servers (this happens daily for almost all ISPs), and hasn’t recognized the new IP addresses of our DNS servers
2. You’re hitting the secondary DNS server at our old data center
3. You’re getting a specific type of error message from this DNS server, due to how your request has been routed (what “hops” it’s taking)
*Then* you have problems accessing Etsy.
We have made special changes to how the secondary DNS server handles these requests, and we expect this to resolve the issue. It might still take a bit of time, because the fix needs to propagate out to the rest of the world.
In an ideal world, our changes would propagate out to all the DNS servers in the amount of time they’re supposed to (1-2 days). Alas, some ISPs take their time, and for that ~1% it can take more like 5 days.
As some people here have noted, you can manually change what DNS servers you use on your computer, but in general this isn’t something we’d recommend. It can slow down accessing other sites on the Web.
Of course please keep letting us know here if any of the issues persist.
Footnote: What is an IP address? It’s a numerical locator, that gets mapped to a domain name. For example, www.etsy.com is also 72.37.157.20 — you can copy that string into your Web browser and use it to visit this site. (Your browser might try and force you to use the domain name though.)
Back when the Web first started, there weren’t domain names, there were only IP addresses. But these were really hard to remember, hence the need for domain names.
A DNS server is what connects the domain name (www.etsy.com) to the IP address (72.37.157.20), approximately speaking. There are master lists on DNS servers around the world, and anytime a domain name points to a different IP, these servers need to update what domain points to what IP address.
Disclaimer: This explanation is oversimplified, and I’m not a system administrator. This is what I’ve learned from reading up on the issue, and getting some input from Etsy’s own sys admins, who have been amazingly busy keep the site up & fast. They’re doing a great job.
If you *really* want to learn more, there’s always Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
Posted at 11:19 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
earlier in the same thread, Revolving Dork said:
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
We have been in touch with various ISPs, and we believe we have found the root of the issue. With their cooperation, the issue should be resolved quickly.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
Thank you!
Posted at 5:24 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
There was an earlier thread that was locked, in which RD said the problem was not on Etsy’s end, and the failure was most likely due to some ISP.
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
The evidence we have so far is pointing towards a failure in one or more ISPs ( internet service providers ) around the world, causing routing problems and cutting some users off from Etsy’s servers. This issue is unfortunately out of our hands, as we only have control over our internal network.
We are in contact with our ISP to see if they have any more information about potential issues. They are also reporting no problems currently, but we’re working with them to figure out the root cause of the issue.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
As reported in this Storque article, Etsy will now be using their old blog for emergency updates, if the main Etsy site goes down. The Storque is hosted on the same servers at the ETsy site so when the site is down, so is the Storque. The old Etsy blog is hosted on a different server, so it will still be up and can be used for emergency updates.
Etsy says:
Since we’ll only use this blog in the event that Etsy itself is totally unreachable for a significant amount of time (which means, I hope we never use it), you might want to make a note of the url now and bookmark the link. Typing the address in directly will be the only way to get there.
We have decided to use the off-site blog in lieu of emailing everyone for several reasons: it takes over 24 hours to send all Etsians an email; when our servers are down or unreachable we most likely can’t send any emails; and we’d be emailing thousands of people who don’t want to get an email.
UPDATE May 22, 2008
The site for updates in an Etsy emergency has been changed to fix.etsy.com.
Bookmark this siite and look there for updates when Etsy.com and the Storque blog are down.
Etsy is currently down, and some tips report it has been down a few hours (at least). I cannot confirm the exact duration of the downtime. If anyone was using Etsy at the exact time it went down, please post your info.
Edit: The site has been down since at least 12:15am EDT.
Edit: Site is back up approximately 2:30am EST.
A little piece of info from admin:
MikeH says:
The site was unfortunately down for a couple of hours due to a network issue. There will be a Storque article with more details coming up as soon as the guys get back from the datacenter.
More info about the downtime from Admin
haim says:
Hi everyone,Around 11:45PM EST our internet connecting fiber lines were accidentally cut. I’ll have a Storque article up later today with complete details including the stuff we have planned to make sure stuff like this doesn’t take us down in the future.
