Linden Lab sorry, busy breaking stuff
This morning's Second Life service outage, Linden Lab says, is the result of "essential maintenance". The maintenance wasn't announced ahead of schedule, but apparently only after it broke things.
It's hard to fault them for wanting to fix things, but a bit of warning is generally the done thing. In this case, notice of the maintenance work was only given after problems began at 12:10AM SLT (US Pacific), with the actual notice coming 34 minutes later at 12:44AM.
According to the Linden Lab's status reports (which we are very happy to see), we're to expect "various difficulties" which is a bit non-specific. Other Second Life users tell us that they see half the grid offline, and "very little seems to be working" - additionally Linden Lab's statistical feeds have been dark since 1:25AM, and logins are slow and erratic.
"Essential maintenance" seems to mean two things from observation, one is "We need to fix something (usually a security exploit) right now" or "Something important is on fire. Pardon us while we grab a blanket and a bucket of sand."
Considering that the announcement came approximately half an hour after things went horribly wrong - we'd guess that the "on fire" option is the one. It would be rude to pull major or critical maintenance otherwise without any advance warning, right?
[Update: 5:00AM SLT - Linden Lab are still working on fixing ... whatever it is. We still don't know what's supposed to have gone wrong. Bonus points for the Support Portal being affected also. Hopefully they will have things together again soon.]
[Update: 7:30AM SLT - Linden Lab reports that everything is functioning again. Support portal, logins, backend services and all that. The statistical feeds came back to life at 7:05 and are starting to give us good data again.]
