This week's patch process not kind to Second Life

Yesterday saw the preparations for today's rolling Second Life update – an 'update to core systems' (Linden Lab have never really explained what that means, but we can reasonably assume we're talking central databases, monitoring systems and a chunk of the backbone code).

The update caused assorted difficulties throughout the day yesterday, and apparently partial services outages through most of the morning this-morning, leading up to today's rolling restart of simulators.

Additionally, once again, stipend payments either failed on execution, or were disrupted by the services outages in the early hours of the morning. The word is that stipend payments are in progress again.

The rolling restart has run into troubles as well. Firstly, there was apparently a code issue which (from the scanty information available) seems indicate that some simulators are not coming up properly, after the restart.

Then we got word that several hundred regions didn't restart at all, when they were told to. Actually, it's possible that this issue could be the same as the last one – the phrasing is a little ambiguous – but they appear to be separate issues.

As of now, the rolling restart has been going since approximately 1PM SLT (US Pacific) with no end in sight.

You may recall that this update is supposed to implement the server-side code for the new authentication/logon system, where you log in to Second Life via the web-site (which starts the viewer for you) rather than through the viewer itself.

[Update: 7:05PM SLT (US Pacific), the rolling restarts are reported to have completed]

[Update: 8:00PM SLT (US Pacific), there appears to be a relatively widespread partial services failure affecting teleports to and from many regions, as well as assets and inventory]