Server Outage

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Hypello
Head Developer
Posts: 3503
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Location: Australia

Server Outage

Post by Hypello » Feb 17th 2017 09:45

An outage occurred earlier today due to maintenance work initiated by the server host in Germany resulting in the downtime of various game servers, the portal, and other services for a period of time between 4-10 hours.

The services affected were: portal, wiki, irc, guildwar, arch, solo, beta.
There were minimal disruptions for: lightning, blitz

We apologize for this lengthy disruption to our servers and services.
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Laanders
Head Designer, Dev etc
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Location: Malmö, Sweden

Re: Server Outage

Post by Laanders » Feb 17th 2017 10:55

To add some detail, as best we can tell all affected services became unavailable at 22:36 CET (game time.) The portal server came up by itself at around 02:50, and remaining servers were manually restored around 08:40. Until the that time, the game servers were completely inaccessible so noone had an advantage of being able to play while others could not get on.

The question was posed about a rollback. We only have daily backups, taken at midnight server time, which means to roll back we'd have to go back almost 23 hours in time, which carries a great deal of added problems. We looked into the possibility of restoring the game to the midnight after, meaning an hour after the downtime began, but since the servers were powered off, no backup was taken at that time.

This basically leaves keeping the game in their current state as the only option. We could have possibly kept them down for an additional period of time, in order to bring them up at a pre-announced time in hopes that most people would be able to get on as soon as possible after. But even that would not necessarily be more fair, since there's no guarantee everyone would still be able to be there. We'd of course also lose more service time, counters/protection/devils/favours would expire, and so on.

For these reasons we decided to simply let the game go ahead directly from the point in time at which service was restored. Thanks for your understanding.
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