
New York Times Web Site Returns After Hours Offline - eplanit
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/business/media/new-york-times-web-site-returns-after-hours-offline.html?_r=0
======
applecore
A news organization as important as the New York Times should have a separate,
fail-safe website for when their main site goes offline. They shouldn't have
to resort to publishing notes on Facebook.

------
teoruiz
I'd love to see a postmortem.

~~~
teoruiz
Ok, this comment is repeated a few times. Never use an app that doesn't have
responsive UI feedback :-(

------
avolcano
During the last major (multi-day) S3 outage, a few sites did similar things. I
remember reading articles from Giant Bomb
([http://giantbomb.com](http://giantbomb.com)) via Google Docs posted on
Twitter by the writers. Obviously, video games aren't quite as important to
most people as world news is, but it's still interesting to see the different
contingency plans news outlets have.

~~~
flyt
Probably the canonical example was Gawker's multi-day publishing system
outage, where they temporarily replaced nearly all their sites with Tumblr
blogs.

------
stfu
Let me make up some crazy conspiracy theory and see how close it comes to the
official narrative:

Three letter agency hacks NYT servers. Servers go down. Official story is
going to be that some super skilled Chinese hackers attacked the NYT.

End result: More cyber defense budget and getting journalists "feel" the
"threat".

------
signed0
They started posting their articles to Facebook while they were down.
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/14/4621324/new-york-times-
pub...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/14/4621324/new-york-times-publishes-
articles-on-facebook-during-site-outage)

------
alexlitov
Probably not very prudent to do schedule a maintenance update at 11am on a
weekday.

~~~
thezilch
I think this a misguided practice. I think...

a) our systems and operations ought to be prepared for and recoverable from
outages at any time of day

b) our developers and operations are best prepared to do their best work when
they are most alert -- early in their work day

I see no technical reasons why maintenance can't be performed at all hours of
a day, without interrupting normal business. Perhaps a misnomer, but
maintenance does not always mean an outage or disruption of services, just
like an outage should not be titled a maintenance (Re: Apple Dev Center
-maintenance- outage).

