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Worldbuilding and Biology, for example, have been offline for about 15 minutes, Science Fiction & Fantasy and Psychology & Neuroscience for somewhat less. Meta disappeared for a bit, but it is back now.

Do we have an update?

I'm in the UK, south of London if relevant.

Update: Worldbuilding has now gone from the "We are offline.." page to "Service unavailable" as of 5 minutes after posting this. Ditto the rest on checking.

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    There was a very active DDoS attack today, we are still in the process of mitigating it. More details to come Monday.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 5:20
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    @JoshZhang you probably hear this often but what's the point in having a status blog and Twitter account if they're not used effectively? Also, if you do hear that often, I'd say that's a problem in and of itself
    – Phil
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 5:43
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    @Phil we're actively working on improving our processes around status updates, today all hands were very busy fighting the fire.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented Feb 7, 2022 at 5:50
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    @JoshZhang what exactly was completed? Can you please explain as edit to existing answer by Tom, or a new answer? It's not clear as it says only "working on improving our processes", or "in the process of revising our outage communication process" but without details.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 2, 2022 at 14:34
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    @ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar we implemented a way to update StackStatus directly from our incident management tool. We used to manually log in to Twitter which was a lot of friction especially during an outage.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented May 2, 2022 at 14:54
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    @JoshZhang thanks, this is better indeed, but answer says "Our plan is to roll out a new status page similar to what many other websites use; this will replace our other mechanisms" - guess it's beyond the scope of this specific bug report, so will there be official announcement when that page will be rolled out?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 3, 2022 at 5:47
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    @ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar we are currently evaluating the replacement status page and working through implementation steps / timeline. I'm not sure if we'll have an official announcement but will make a note to revisit when time comes.
    – Josh Zhang StaffMod
    Commented May 3, 2022 at 18:52

1 Answer 1

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I am a Product Manager in the Platform Engineering team.

Our apologies for the lack of communication during the previous outage. As you correctly pointed out, we were suffering an outage and our usual channels were not used to communicate status. You are also correct in that our communication during outages has been (to be polite) uneven lately.

We apologize and are working to do better in the future.

We are currently in the process of revising our outage communication process to make it more streamlined and consistent. Our plan is to roll out a new status page similar to what many other websites use; this will replace our other mechanisms.

As of May 2022, we implemented a way to update StackStatus directly from our incident management tool. We used to manually log in to Twitter which was a lot of friction especially during an outage, so this should improve the overall process.

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    "Our plan is to roll out a status page" - Isn't that what this is? "revising our outage communication" - Just make sure someone has the keys to the Twitter account.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 0:43
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    Thanks, but any details about the attack itself? Was it blocked? Did you take any measures to block such attack in the future?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 6:50
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    @MrWhite Not really. That domain currently points to a Tumblr where things can be posted like any other social media. This is a better example of a status page.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 6:59
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    Yeah, I hope it's better than the purported better Facebook example. Three clicks deep to get details and your get blown off with boilerplate: status.fb.com/adsmanager/history - could have guessed those three very similar reports without looking. Really better: ClickUp - Dashboard, Asana - Kaban Board, or a dedicated UpTime monitor.
    – Rob
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 16:29
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    @MrWhite Thank you for pointing that out. I've added the word "new" to that sentence to clarify for others that may have been similarly confused.
    – Tom Limoncelli StaffMod
    Commented Feb 8, 2022 at 23:01
  • "We apologize and are working to do better in the future." Is there a timeline on this? During the latest attack, in the Tavern, Catija claimed it wasn't a DDoS. Turns out it was. Now, we all make mistakes and you won't have a new system set-up in a week naturally, but the current communication is significantly worse than we had years ago (pre-2019).
    – Mast
    Commented Mar 15, 2022 at 6:51
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    @Mast I guess it's kind of mixed causes and Catija only reported the latter. The DDoS attack itself was mitigated earlier (possibly within the first 2 hours), but the side-effect took the server down longer than the attack (more than 10 hours)
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Mar 15, 2022 at 7:50

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