Down for Maintenance?

[MoberlyDrake]

Is the website still down for maintenance???

[Wheal]

I guess so, I haven't been able to log in all afternoon.

[Tmason]

So it would seem. I only just remembered the forums are separate, so I might be able to log in here.

[MoberlyDrake]

But it was only supposed to be until 7:00 AM CDT according to the email I received. That was long ago!

I am a project administrator and I told someone I'd send them an invitation to join the project. As it is, I can't do that or anything else.

[Tmason]

I assume the emails are only to project administrators, as I've NEVER had an email about site downtime.

In fact, I've very rarely had an email about anything that wasn't sales.

I did register to be notified of webinars, as I noticed they'd been happening, but I missed them. I'm not sure that ever worked too well, and then the webinars stopped anyway.

Funny how they have no trouble emailing the entire customer base about a sale, but insisted they couldn't do the same about educational events. Surely one is no more irritating (or less useful) than the other?

[MoberlyDrake]

Here's the email:

Dear Project Administrators,

Summer is in full swing and so is FTDNA! On Tuesday, July 11, we will have a planned outage for maintenance from 3:00 AM CDT to approximately 7:00 AM CDT. The team will work to finish as quickly as possible, so it may take less time, but please be prepared for it to take that entire time. This outage will affect GAP as well as the main website.

As always, thank you for the work you do with your projects. We appreciate it, and we appreciate you.

Sincerely,

The Family Tree DNA Team

[rrrobins]

The site did come back up for a while this morning as I was able to get on and check project discussions, but a short time later I went back and it was down again and has stayed down all day so far, so I guess the maintenance ran into problems.

[Renee]

Does anyone know how this will affect processing time for kits if at all? Also have any project administrators gotten any new word about what's going on?

[MoberlyDrake]

I don't think it would affect anything it the lab at all.

[MoberlyDrake]

I do think they should make an announcement here on the forum to let everyone know what's going on.

[OldFinneyKid]

Status posted at Facebook

FTDNA posted this on their Facebook page:

SITE UPDATE: Due to a few unforeseen issues related to an update the site is currently down for maintenance. We are working on fixing the issues and hope to have everything resolved by tomorrow morning CST. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

[paynevj]

Posted on Twitter 10:22 pm Eastern time:


Family Tree DNA
@FamilyTreeDNA

Dear Customers: we are still working on fixing a few issues resulting from the site update last night. We appreciate your patience.
10:22 PM - 11 Jul 2017

[chmada]

Unplanned downtime is sometimes unavoidable...

...and providing customers with information should never be avoided.

I worked for years in IT and 'suffered' through some fairly scary mornings after nighttime upgrades that should have been completed no later than the beginning of business hours didn't go well.

The first thing that I did when the sun came up was find the key people in the organization and tell them what I thought they should expect. Then I went back to fixing the problem. If it took longer that a little while I gave the key people updates and they shared them with all employees. That is the way this business is supposed to work.

These days I've noticed that businesses often say nothing and later they never explain. I believe that runs the risk of damaging confidence. I know mine is a bit fractured this morning with FTDNA.

[John McCoy]

Corporate outages are indeed scary for the staff who are expected to fix them! I suffered for years with the responsibility for a system that tended to fail in the middle of the night, and I would have to go to the office in the wee hours to fix whatever program had failed. Eventually, I got the encouragement I needed to develop a nearly fool-proof test plan, such that every program change was tested and verified behind the scenes with real data before being migrated into production. Sound development, test, migration, back-out, and recovery procedures make for relaxed, productive employees, and they also protect the business and its reputation. There's no reason genetics and/or genealogy companies can't do this as well.

[Wheal]

New matches?

Very curious...I have new matches, 50 cM and up... not a complaint by any means, but wondering if any else has noticed they have new matches, or at least different matching levels.