Linode Outage 2009-10-27

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Posted by ddd, 10-27-2009, 07:53 PM
Linode is apparently having network-wide issues due to a botched upgrade.

Quote:

During a shared library update distributed to our hosts, a number of the hosts incorrectly have marked Linodes as being shut down. To recover from this we may be issuing host reboots to upgrade their software to our latest stack, and then bringing the Linodes to their last state. We're working on this now and expect to have additional updates shortly. We'll also be notifying those affected via our support ticket system. Please stand by.

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4765

I didn't see any other threads, and their forums are down with the rest of their site so I figured I should post here.

One of my linodes has been down 2 hours now and another 2 for about 20 minutes each. Linode has been disturbingly quiet on updates. The last one was an hour ago as of this writing via twitter: "Linodes are continuing to come up as we recover from the outage"

Linode has some serious customer service issues here. First of all these updates are not nearly frequent or informative enough. Further, there is no reliable way for customers to receive updates. Their forums are useless if their entire site is going to be down, and they have no status page. They should have a SEPARATELY HOSTED status site that doesn't go down with everything else. It's ridiculous to force users to go searching for any sort of communication on twitter and elsewhere. I've had issues with communication before; unfortunately there haven't been much improvements. Great service otherwise, but I can see other users' frustration via twitter as well.
Posted by arjones85, 10-27-2009, 08:08 PM
Would you rather they spend time posting updates, or spend time fixing the problem?

I, for one, would rather they spend time fixing the problem. Your VPS isn't going to be up any quicker rather they tell you "It's still down" every 30 minutes or not.
Posted by ddd, 10-28-2009, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by arjones85

Would you rather they spend time posting updates, or spend time fixing the problem?

I, for one, would rather they spend time fixing the problem. Your VPS isn't going to be up any quicker rather they tell you "It's still down" every 30 minutes or not.

Well as a customer I expect both quick response and good communication/customer service. Although the frequency of communication was only part of the problem. It was exacerbated by confused methods for communication. While there were some updates via twitter, they gave very few details as to what was happening. And it was frustrating to refer to a thread in their forums for updates when their entire site and forums were down also. It's very simple to set up a free account at tumblr or wordpress and set up a simple status page that is outside their network. When your server is down and there isn't much information you begin to wonder what's going on... whether it's a network issue, whether the vps is rebooted, whether there is potential data loss... these are questions and concerns that could be addressed during such an event.