StackOverflow Is Down

#1

Post by agluszak » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#2

Post by connordoner » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

For anyone looking on this from the future, the error page has Content-Type set to text/html but literally returns the text: "The service is unavailable." and a newline character.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#3

Post by Victerius » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#4

Post by ollien » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

Victerius wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

I know you're joking, but an SE employee (I believe it was Nick Craver, who is now a former SE SRE) mentioned on Twitter a while ago that employees use database backups and spin up local instances for exactly this reason...

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#5

Post by mellosouls » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

It had the same issue the other day, at least for a few minutes, so possibly an ongoing glitch?

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#6

Post by iasay » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

Victerius wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

They wouldn't find a solution because all the good answers were moderated away into oblivion :D

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#7

Post by JLCarveth » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

They were down for several hours a week ago. It seems they've been having some sustained issues maybe? https://twitter.com/StackStatus/

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#8

Post by jollyllama » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

So what is their stack, or where can I find more about it? A totally custom webserver? Someone commented to this effect the yesterday [1], but I couldn't find much in the way of a good writeup, except this answer from 2009 [2].

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321726 2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackove...

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#9

Post by blacklight » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

And this is at least the 4th or 5th time within 10 days that either the website is down or performance is badly degraded.

So bad for a website that is basically the go-to resource where IT professionals get their answers.

So bad that the whole platform is closed-source, so we can't even spin multiple instances.

The main resource used by developers and sysadmins around the world is locked and centralized, and when that central place goes down all the answers go down with it.

We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

And, most of all, we need alternatives that are open and decentralized, and we need them right now.

Re: StackOverflow Is Down

#10

Post by racl101 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

You mean I gotta start thinking on my own?

Not sure that will work.