Grid problems don't make Linden Lab happy either
It's no surprise that Second Life has been having some trouble this week - mostly apparently related to bug fixes and upgrades, unfortunately. If you didn't much notice it, you probably didn't spend a whole lot of time online actively poking the asset and inventory servers (or trying to buy land) - particularly in the early hours of the SL morning.
Linden Lab have had just as rough a time with the platform this week apparently as well, with some of their own applications and batch jobs faring no better.
Group payments - Group disbursements likewise messed up - and it appears that this was trickier to repair, or didn't get noticed at the time. Yesterday's payments ultimately got processed today.
Billing - We're not quite sure what relation it has to the grid databases, but considering that account billing runs were disrupted two days in a row, there's most likely some connection. This is still being worked on.
While it's likely unrelated, apparently over the Thanksgiving break, Linden Lab wound up trying to bill a bunch of free Basic accounts. We don't know how many people are affected. Refunds are being processed and Linden Lab are making an effort to clean this up - but Linden Lab's record on refunds and repairs of erroneous billing are poor.
