As you may have noticed, starting at approximately 11:30am MST (GMT -7) today, we experienced a service outage lasting for approximately 2 hours, which we spent feverishly troubleshooting in cooperation with our datacenter techs to identify and isolate the cause of this unscheduled lapse in service.
We determined the outage was caused by a hard drive failure in one of our servers' RAID arrays -- a rather ironic fluke, since the purpose of our RAID configuration is to provide reliability and fault tolerance in case of a drive failure, so this was somewhat akin to having the airbag in your car go off spontaneously to cause an accident.
The malfunctioning equipment responsible for the outage has now been removed from service and replaced with a known-good unit, and we will be taking steps to further improve our redundancy and failsafe provisions to prevent any future outages of this nature.
This was our first service outage in well over a year, and the only outage we've had since moving our service to more robust equipment provisions at our current datacenter just over a year ago. The collaboration of expert staff at this datacenter was invaluable in helping us to identify and remove the effective cause of the outage and instrumental in minimizing its duration.
We are very sorry for the unforeseeable equipment malfunction which caused this unexpected outage, and we apologize profusely for any and all inconvenience you may have experienced as a result.
