Newsgator down…..yet again! Now there is useful information! at RunningWithBulls.com

Newsgator down…..yet again! Now there is useful information!

Published by bbt April 18th, 2006 in bernard, irishblogs, runningwithbulls.com, websites

[UPDATE 2:] Newsgator have now changed their maintenance page to something more useful.

Honesty is the place policy guys. Or at least as close to honesty as you can go!

[UPDATE:] Ok, I think someone noticed, not sure who, but someone did. They also noticed all these people too
Ok, so NewsGator have put up some scant information about the outage:

When I bought NetNewsWire the excellent application made by Brent Simmons in Ranchero Software, I wished for a) the opportunity to use a Mac in work (a Microsoft house-are you kidding?!), or b) the opportunity to synchronize my feeds between two places.

Until NetNewsWire was aquired by NewsGator recently I waited…
NetNewsWire users can synch their feeds with NewsGators online news aggregator site, and read them online.

NewsGator is a pretty good service, all in all. Normally the synch takes mere seconds..when the site is up.

Since this morning (8AM European time) NewsGator has been down, the .com, the .co.uk, and all other languages. I’d be happy to read my feeds in Spanish if I could.

Up until about 9:30 after login was showing a number of SQL errors, and IIS/SQL webconfig errors. Thats not too bad, but what really pisses me off, is that they have a blog, and there is no entry even to say “oops, something is up..give us some time to fix it.”

This happens quite a number of times, almost 2/3 times a month since I have started using it. Sometimes its only a mere refresh to get it working, or maybe logon to the .com site, instead of the .co.uk site. (there is a point. NewsGator: Is it possible to stop the auto refresh that happens when I try to go to .com site? Please)

Maybe I am just too demanding…but thats all I am looking for.

Just to clarify: this isn’t a complaint about NetNewsWire, moreso, I hope Brent might notice this.

So, come on NewsGator, please tell us whats up.

Hopefully they will iron out the creases soon.

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10 Responses to “Newsgator down…..yet again! Now there is useful information!”

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1 Jack Brewster Apr 18th, 2006 at 4:37 pm

I work in NewsGator technical support. Just wanted to let you know that the service is back up.
2 bbt Apr 18th, 2006 at 5:32 pm

Hea Jack,

Thank you very much for the comment! I really mean that.

I mean I understand exactly what happens when things go bad, but all people really wanted (I think) was a “Hi, something broke with the magic. We’ll get it fixed and be right back.”

Thats all I was looking for really.

Not going into too much detail, but can you tell us what happened? This morning (approx. 8AM European time) I saw alot of errors with SQL session state messages. Sounds very like an issue we have had in the past regarding user sessions in our particular DB.
You guys aren’t using content switches by any chance?
It seems things happen too often.

Maybe a suggestion: you guys (the Technical Support guys) should get a technical support/maintenance blog to notify people about these kinda things. I have an ISP blog feed that keeps me up to date with technical outages from them. Useful when these kinda things happen.

Anyway, many thanks for the feedback. And overall, I really enjoy the Newsgator service.

Thank you Jack,

bernard
3 Jack Brewster Apr 18th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

Sorry for the extra posting, but I wanted to also mention that we have a brief announcement about the outage on our forums:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=22&MessageID=16794

We will update this post later today when more detail about the outage is available.
4 Jack Brewster Apr 18th, 2006 at 5:58 pm

I can’t speak to the details of the outage yet. The devs are still working on documenting what happened for us and our customers.

We sort of have a blog via the Announcements forum on our support forums. That’s where the link I provided earlier points to. The forum has its own feed, as well:
http://www.newsgator.com/forum/rssfeed.aspx?id=22&Task=ForumRSS

Unfortunately, this particular outage also took our forums off line, so this wouldn’t have been much help in this particular case.
5 bbt Apr 18th, 2006 at 6:11 pm

Hi Jack,

Sure, I understand you can’t talk about specifics at the moment. Thats completely understandable.

I see the forums and the XML feed for the announcements, but as you said, if the site goes down, so does the feed!

It might be a useful idea to get a hosted blog/feed somewhere else and post these there too.

One company that do something similar is: TextDrive.com http://weblog.textdrive.com/

They post their tech related issues there. it is hosted in a differnet area, so if the main site does down, it is not affected.

Might be a useful thing for you. A free wordpress would even do!

Again, thanks for the updates.

I hope things aren’t too mad for you guys!

bernard
6 Jack Brewster Apr 18th, 2006 at 8:32 pm

Greg Reinacker - CTO and Founder - has posted a very detailed description of the issue on his blog:
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=808
7 bbt Apr 18th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

Hea Jack,

Thanks for the comment. I have read Greg’s post, and I have to say, that sounded very familiar heh, I have been that soldier!

Anyway, all is up and running. I have posted Greg’s details here:
http://www.runningwithbulls.com/blog/2006/04/18/newsgator-heres-what-happened/

thanks again for keeping people up to date with the problems.

bernard