Civil Beat Is Back — We Apologize for the Outage
We’re back!
We’re sorry that our main website was down for so long. We are committed to serving Honolulu and Hawaii, and in this instance we let you down.
Early Thursday morning, we began a process that we believed we could finish before most people in Hawaii were at work. We were wrong.
We were moving a dozen servers to a brand new datacenter at a time when hundreds of other customers of our service provider were doing the same thing, and the data pipes got clogged with all of the data that needed to be moved. The network delays were completely outside of our control.
But the responsibility for the outage is ours and ours alone. We had no choice but to move our servers, but we could have handled the situation better.
For example, we discovered too late that one of our critical database servers had a huge amount of redundant backup data, and transferring such a large amount of data (140 GB) took the better part of two days.
While our main site has been down, we hope you followed the links from our maintenance notice to our other delivery channels, such as the blogs we’ve developed, especially , and and .
If you’re not familiar with our blogs, they represent the specialty areas our reporter-hosts cover and other areas of wide interest, such as , , and .
Here is a list of the staff blogs:
The staff blogs are typically the place we keep readers abreast of developments during the day on our beats, everything from insider insight into what we’re working on to news we think you should know about. During the outage, we asked the blogs to pull heavier duty as the main reporting vehicles for Civil Beat.
We know that’s not the same as having a site where your comments show up prominently on the home page and you can dig into our related stories on any topic you’re interested in. But the blogs are an important — and growing — aspect of our service.
These have been a difficult few days. We have been very frustrated by what happened, just as we know that many of you were frustrated by not being able to visit the site. We are sorry we let you down. We are glad to be back.
You’ll find plenty of stories you probably haven’t seen on the site today. And we’ve already got a good lineup of new stories for Monday.
Mahalo for your understanding.
