Update: Hey, it seems SocialSpark is working again. Yay!
I was notified that I got two opportunity reservations at lunch time today. I ate and took a nap, thinking I still had 12 hours to complete the opp anyways. But when I woke up a couple of hours later I couldn’t load SocialSpark.
My first thought was perhaps my IP had been banned for autoreloading the page every minute (opps at SocialSpark are first come first serve, you see). So I visited a proxy site and entered SocialSpark.com. The proxy could not load it either. I asked a friend of mine across the country to load SocialSpark, and he couldn’t either. I also checked if SocialSpark is online through DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com and it returned a 502 Server Error. So my best guess is SocialSpark is down again.
SocialSpark went down a few days ago, along with IZEA and PayPerPost. This time though, IZEA and PayPerPost are working. Searching through Google, I can’t find anyone having the same problem, all searches lead back to the first downtime.
IZEA gives this explanation for the first downtime that happened on June 25:
In a nutshell, the data center we used screwed up. I honestly still don’t know precisely what happened other than something happened within the data center that knocked everyone there completely off the grid. The servers themselves were never harmed or put in jeopardy and ran along quite happily, just without any traffic. The main Internet feeds in and out of the data center were also fine. Something internally at the data center screwed up and it took them a stunning 10 or so hours to figure it out.
We will absolutely be moving to a distributed architecture as a result of this as soon as possible.
They also posted this message yesterday:
Following the Data Center debacle earlier this week, we are deploying some changes to the site at 22:15 Eastern. We will need to take the site down for about 2 minutes to accomplish this.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
So I’m not sure if the outage today means they’re doing maintenance. Darn am I gonna lose my opps in a few hours?! 🙁 Anybody having the same problem?
