Explanation for the catastrophic failure on March 26, 2012?

[jwalber]

Has anyone heard what happened today around 1:15pm EDT when the entire Adobe Connect world crashed? We had about 1000 students online from around the world in day 1 of a 2 day an environmental education event. The cryptic support page showed every major server down while we scrambled to find an alternative solution for our program which included closed captioning, and speakers in Panama, Washington and Phoenix. Using email, twitter and facebook we rallied people into a competitive product but lost 2/3 of our audience. What a disaster....

As usual, Adobe has yet to explain what happened, or even attempt to assure us that the issue is fixed and that we are safe to try again tomorrow. Does anyone know what happened? Does anyone feel safe enough to trust high-profile international events to these people?

Your feedback is much appreciated.

jw

[Kristian_C1]

Hi JW,

We have about 1000 students who participate in classes 6 days/week on hosted servers and I can honestly say that we've only experienced 2 outages in the past 12 months. I agree that Adobe is not at all forthcoming with details about problems and that their technical support is poor, but I'm generally satisfied wtih their uptime.

Could you please send me the link to the support page that reports on server outages? I didn't realise that they provided that information. Thanks.

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

Here is the link: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/adobeconnect/index.cfm?event=serverStatus

[Kristian_C1]

Wow... That's cool

[Jorma_at_CoSo]

Just recieved this explanation of what happend yesterday:

Adobe wrote:

On Monday 26-Mar-2012 between 10:35am and 12:13pm Pacific Time the datacenter in which your account is hosted experienced a loss of network connectivity due to a massive multi-region backbone network failure within our primary network provider. Then, between 1:26pm and 2:04pm Pacific Time the network experienced latency and intermittent connectivity while the engineering and operations teams worked to resolve the issue. As of 2:04pm Pacific Time on 26-Mar-2012 the situation was resolved and the network has remained stable.

Additionally, during the outage with the primary network, there was a temporary gap in secondary network connectivity in the datacenter. This gap was remedied as of 2am Pacific Time on 27-Mar-2012, restoring redundancy to the network tier.

Please accept our apologies if this incident affected your ability to use Adobe Connect. We strive to provide a highly available service that you can rely on, and are making changes to ensure that even a future outage of this magnitude will not affect your ability to access or use your account. Please contact us if you have any further questions or need additional clarification.


Best regards,
The Adobe Connect Team