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UPDATE: The test is complete.

tl;dr; Planned service interruption that will impact all Stack Exchange sites, Jobs, and Chat. All sites will be read-only for up to 1 hour on Wed June 30, 2021 at 01:00 UTC (Tue June 29 9:00 PM US/EDT). Stack Overflow might experience some instability during this time as well. Enterprise cloud hosted instances will not be impacted.

Short Version:

There will be a service degradation for up to 1 hour, 01:00 UTC on June 30th, 2021 (June 29th 9:00 PM US/EDT). During that time questions and answers will still display, job listings will still work, and job ads will still display. However, the site will be "read only," i.e. people won't be able to add/edit new job listings, apply for jobs, post, edit or vote on questions/comments/answers, reputation won't change, etc. This should minimize the disruption to the majority of casual readers. We will display a banner on the sites stating we're 'read only' for maintenance.

Longer Version of What's Taking Place?

Background

Our primary database servers, which power Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Chat, and other things, run out of a datacenter in New Jersey plus our secondary location in Colorado. We are performing a test of our disaster recovery system as part of our regular system maintenance.

What we'll be doing

During the service interruption traffic will be directed to our secondary location in Colorado, but services will remain in read-only mode. This will allow us to confirm a number of systems are running properly, while under a full production load. Once we’ve had an opportunity to examine our metrics and logs, we will move the traffic back to the primary data center.

Questions or concerns?

Please post a comment or answer below; I'll do my best to address any concerns between now and the maintenance window.

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  • 4
    Will chat also be read-only?
    – bobble
    Commented Jun 28, 2021 at 20:54
  • @bobble Yes chat will be read-only also.
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Jun 28, 2021 at 21:21
  • 2
    Can the planned maintenance activity be updated in stackstatus.net too?
    – Arulkumar
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 6:55
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    Good point @Arulkumar, I asked about this a while back: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/366770/…
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 7:51
  • 1
    We'll be posting it to stackstatus before we start the maintenance. To me, it seems like it would be better to use stackstatus more "real time" and post the more advance notification here. As I mentioned in the comment below, we're updating our team guidance so we can be more consistent. I'll be sure the feedback here is taken into account.
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 14:23
  • 2
    If you can see this comment, we're now back in read/write. The site will probably be much faster now :)
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 2:04

1 Answer 1

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I didn't expect to write two similar answers today, but hey why not...

If this is part of regular maintenance (which implies you can schedule it freely), why only announce it 1 day in advance?

SE has a good standing of announcing planned service interruptions at least 6-8 days prior, why is this one any different?

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    Let's hope you didn't trigger an auto-mod flag ....
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 6:56
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    I was actually planning to announce it first thing in the morning, but I got Monday'd. In hindsight I should have probably had it queued up last week so I could just post it first thing. We're working on an updated policy for how to handle maintenance and outage notifications so the team can be more consistent.
    – Mike Frank Staff
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 14:17
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    @MikeFrank Yeah mondays suck, I know all about it. But then still, it would only have been ˜2 days. A week or so would be a preferable timewindow for such an announcement.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Jun 29, 2021 at 14:24
  • Announcements tend to be 6-8 weeks not hours, usually resulting in a few months or years I believe.
    – Thomas Weller
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 16:37

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