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Skype outage post-mortem puts some blame on the elder Windows clients
If you wish to raise your fist in the air and curse anyone for the massive global Skype outage, direct your anger towards 5.0.0.152. That's the Skype for Windows version that crashed when a December 22nd cluster of support servers responsible for offline messaging became overloaded. While that's the only version affected -- the latest 5.0.0.156 and 4.0 versions were fine, as were the clients for every other platform you can think of -- the number of users running point-152 globally represent 50 percent of all the users. More importantly for the other half of the world, about 25 to 30 percent of all supernodes were affected, too, whose role is establish connections, among others. So... up to 30 percent of supernodes are down worldwide. The other 70 percent were taking on the increased load. The crashed Windows clients were by and large being restarted simultaneously by affected users. All this happened just before the usual daily peak hours and during the holiday season. It's almost a comedy of errors, were it not impossible at the time to call someone and share in the laughter. For its part, Skype goes into detail over how it fixed the current situation and how it plans to be better equipped to handle any future duress. It's a pretty interesting read, we suggest you set some time aside and check it out.
Kodak Pulse email-to-photo-frame system down for days, millions of memories trapped in the cloud (updated)
We definitely know quite a few people (including this very editor!) who bought their parents Kodak Pulse WiFi photo frames over the holidays, since they seem like a perfect way to share pictures without any fuss -- you can just email the frame directly. Unfortunately, it seems like this cloud service has a dark, dark lining: Kodak's backend email servers have been down since at least Christmas Eve, rendering the Pulse's most interesting feature essentially useless. What's worse, that status display above is more or less buried on the Pulse web site, so it's not even immediately clear that the problem is on Kodak's side -- and when things turn back on we're guessing more than one Pulse owner will find tons of duped photos on their frames from multiple email attempts, since the system doesn't confirm email receipt. We've heard a few anecdotal stories about email photo delivery slowing down / stopping during previous high traffic periods, so you'd think Kodak would have sorted this out by now, but we guess not -- we'll let you know when the company tells us about a fix. Update: Kodak emailed us to say things are working again -- here's the statement: We experienced slower performance of the Pulse server over the holiday weekend due to much higher than anticipated volumes. This resulted in a delay of pictures that were emailed to the Pulse frame. We did immediately address this issue and any pictures consumers emailed have since been delivered. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers. It is our goal to ensure a great experience for all Pulse owners.
AT&T maintenance tonight to cause connection issues
A news announcement on the login screen is letting us all know that AT&T, the people who provide data center service to Blizzard, will be performing maintenance tonight from 12:00 a.m. EST until 5:00 a.m. EST. This will likely cause problems with both being able to login to the game and stay connected. This is an odd maintenance announcement, and one that I don't recall seeing before.Hopefully this will not develop into anything more serious – such as extended network outages or other such issues.
Extended maintenance tomorrow
All U.S. realms will be offline for extended maintenance tomorrow from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. This came from an announcement via the login screen.Servers have been mostly stable this past week after a series of rolling restarts Blizzard did a few days ago. Hopefully this won't cause too many problems for those hoping to enjoy the game Tuesday evening.Stay tuned to WoW Insider for the latest on realm issues and other WoW news.
Tuesday April 29th maintenance
...and Bornakk looked upon the World (of Warcraft) in its seventh day and said: "Let there be maintenance." And so it was.Bornakk posted on the General Discussion Forums this afternoon that there will be maintenance tomorrow on all realms from 3:00 a.m. PDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT. Additionally, the forums themselves will be undergoing maintenance from 5:00 a.m. PDT until 8:00 a.m. PDT. You will not be able to log in to the forums, but you will be able to read them.Patch 2.4.2 was announced last week and is on the PTR right now. However, it is unlikely that the patch will come tomorrow. The PTR phase of minor patches almost always lasts two weeks. Of course with that said, I'm sure I'll be eating my words tomorrow as 2.4.2 goes live. We'll all just have to stay tuned and find out!
PSN Store down today for 'scheduled maintenance'
According to the US PlayStation Support site, the PSN store will be down for "scheduled maintenance" from 8AM - 11PM PST today. The PlayStation Blog is a little looser with the time of the maintenance, expressing it'll be from early today through the "early morning of Tuesday, April 15." Once the downtime ends, users will be prompted to download a firmware update.All of this, of course, is in preparation for the new PSN Store going live tomorrow. We do not believe this behind-the-scenes updating will affect other PSN features such as chat or games, but if something does go wrong -- well, this will probably be the reason.[Via PS3 Fanboy]%Gallery-19777%
Patch night connectivity issues may be over soon [UPDATED]
We've gotten quite a few tips and reports that there have been some issues with connectivity this evening. It seems many people have been getting disconnected upon leaving an instanced dungeon or battleground and are unable to log back in on that character.We don't have much solid information on what's causing it, but the theory so far has been an ISP issue. I'm not very tech savvy when it comes to that sort of thing, so I can't really say how true that may or may not be. However, our buddy Belfaire seems to be doing what he can to take care of it. He just posted that they think they've found the issue and may be rolling out a fix.So, you guys with characters stuck in limbo? Hopefully your problems will go away very soon.Updates behind the cut as they come.
Extended maintenance [Updated]
The in-game breaking news text just announced extended maintenance for tomorrow. This again, is a strong indicator that patch 2.4 is on the immediate queue. We can expect the down time to be at least until 11 a.m. PDT. This normally is substantially higher on patch days, usually lasting until around 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. PDT.WoW Insider staff will be burning the midnight oil to make sure that you have a good list of patch mirrors and addon information ready to go when you wake up tomorrow morning.Additionally, Belfaire has said that the patch is more around 300 megs, not the 900 megs that is showing up on Gamespot. Further more, the Gamespot download is a 2.0 to 2.4 update, which very few people will need tomorrow.Updated 12:20 a.m. PDT: Belfaire is having fun with me. First he confirms, then he edits, then he edits again...Updated 1:12 a.m. PDT: Updated Gameespot info, thanks to those who left comments on tonight's posts. And a fix for Belfaire. =)
EVE gets a Boost on Tuesday
In case you've been too busy ratting, mining, or you've been offline training up those long-duration skills, we thought we'd point out that there's a new patch for EVE Online coming this Tuesday. The patch, called "Boost", is chock full of database fixes from what we've been given to understand. Sadly, the patch notes aren't currently out according to the official thread, or we'd have them for you here.As to why they're doing such a long downtime this Tuesday, Erlendur S. Thorsteinsson, EVE's Software Director, jumped out to answer:
Dear Blizzard : Server issues
Dear Blizzard,For whatever reason, your game has been experiencing multiple server related issues in the past few weeks. Many players have seen themselves offline an abnormal amount of time, and for no apparent reason. Some realms have been brought offline for emergency maintenance and stayed that way for nearly a day. Other realms are seeing themselves either reset or become sundered down with mass disconnects that make any serious play almost impossible. Just the other night I was happily grouping with some friends over on Eldre'Thalas, when all of the sudden the server decided to boot me, and only me, from the game. Lo and behold, when trying to log back in I get stuck on authentication. My other two accounts would not work either. What makes this even better is that Eldre'Thalas wasn't even on the list of realms under emergency maintenance.You've been giving us all this downtime lately, so I'm wondering, what are you going to do to fix it? Or baring a fix, at least make our $15 a month worth it.
