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Thursday, November 18, 1999
Stateline.org Humbled By Squirrel
By The Editors
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If you're a regular visitor to this Web site, you probably noticed that stateline.org has been out of commission a lot in the last few days. We experienced two maddening crashes this week: one on Monday that made us inaccessible from approximately 3:45 PM EST to 7:35 PM EST, and an even worse one on Wednesday that caused a blackout from approximately 1:45 PM EST until the wee hours of Thursday morning.
Hopefully, all of those problems are now behind us. Stateline.org is now on a new dedicated server that should make the site much faster loading and much more reliable. But as our recent Internet woes illustrate, there are still a lot of potholes on the Information Highway.
What happened was this: on Monday afternoon, part of Falls Church, Va. where our Web hosting firm is located, lost electrical power for about 45 minutes. According to the Virginia Power & Light Company, a squirrel got into a switching box in a neighborhood substation, causing a short circuit that triggered the outage.
Remarkably, our Web host -- one of Washington's leading high-tech firms -- was not prepared for such an event, and down went stateline.org.
This misfortune begot another. Monday's power outage apparently damaged the computer software that was running our site, resulting in Wednesday's crash. Makes you wonder about the soundness of the infrastructure of the much-acclaimed cyberworld, doesn't it? We were already in the process of upgrading the operating system, so we accelerated the transition and now have a brand-new one.
If our recent troubles caused you any inconvenience, we sincerely apologize. All that is now hopefully behind us. As we've learned, however, this new information technology is tempermental, so keep your fingers crossed!
If you have questions or comments, e-mail Managing Editor.
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