503 errors.

[AvatarIII]

I keep getting 503 errors today, just wondering if anyone else is getting them? it seems to only be for a couple of minutes and then works again, but there was quite a long one a little while ago, and it looks like, by looking on the unread posts page, that there were no new posts between 2:28 and 2:46 PM UTC, so i figured it was happening to everyone, but no one seems to be posting about it, so perhaps it is just me.

i don't think it's "my end" because all other sites work fine, but forums.* fora.* and forums.xkcd.com all had the same errors simultaneuosly.

[SecondTalon]

If you could, record roughly what time these outages are occurring. Feel free to put it in whatever format you'd like, but translating to GMT/UTC would be swanky.

[TaintedDeity]

I also got a long 503 error across the whole forum at about the same time Avatar mentioned, although I'm having no further 503 errors now that the forum seems to be working.

[AvatarIII]

I also got a long 503 error across the whole forum at about the same time Avatar mentioned, although I'm having no further 503 errors now that the forum seems to be working.

ah so it wasn't just me.

if it happens again, i'll make not of exactly what time it stops and starts working again, but like Taint said, it seems to be working fine again. i haven't had any errors since i posted.

[SecondTalon]

I have also had no problems. I have experienced this in the past, but unpredictably and it usually vanishes within 30 minutes or so.

Still, I'd like to know the times if nothing else than to verify that it's universal and not limited to a certain subset of the Internet, or at least as much as we can determine that.

[AvatarIII]

Yeah, i didn't really take note of the times it happened, i assumed it would go away eventually (which it has now) and only bothered posting because it had happened multiple times today.

Taint and I are both from the UK so that is already some correlation,

[Adacore]

I had a couple of inexplicable 503 errors a few days ago that may well have been between the times mentioned - I can't remember. I'll try and record the times when/if it happens again.

[gmalivuk]

Couldn't access the site this morning from about 7:45 to 7:50 EDT, at which point I gave up and got ready for work.

[greengiant]

I got 503s today too. When it came back up I looked on the 'new posts' page and there were no posts between 10:11 am UTC and 1:02 pm UTC so I'm guessing it was down for roughly that period.

[yurell]

I couldn't access the site for the past hour and neither could Torchship (Australia here). Alright now.
I could access the comic, though, if that helps.

[halbarad]

Another UK person checking in that couldn't access the forum for about an hour. At first it was just timing out in Google Chrome, then got some 503 messages and eventually got SQL query errors, forgot to screenshot it though.

[madjo]

Today, around 1.30PM CET xkcd.com was barely reachable for me. The site had trouble loading, took about 5 minutes to just get the frontpage up and that was even without showing any images, and the forum just didn't respond (browser either timed out or tripped a timeout message from the firewall here).
About 15 minutes after that, the site started to load normally again for me (including images), but the forums gave either a 503 or an sql error after a long time loading.

[gmalivuk]

Okay, I think that's enough confirmation for the forums' downtime a couple hours ago. Looks like it was pretty much everywhere.

[AvatarIII]

I got 503 just before 12:50pm UK time, and another one a few minutes later, in both cases a refresh after 30 seconds or so got me back to the forums, I thought it might be worth pointing out in case it escalates into full on downtime later today...

[Angua]

I got the same thing (also UK)

[gmalivuk]

Looks like this one was only a few minutes, but not limited to the UK. (I suspect 503 errors are pretty much always server-side, and therefore will happen for everyone everywhere.)