New York Times Web Site Returns After Hours Offline | Hacker News Reader

New York Times Web Site Returns After Hours Offline

nytimes.com

15 pointseplanit10 comments

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.

I'd love to see a postmortem.

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

During the last major (multi-day) S3 outage, a few sites did similar things. I remember reading articles from Giant Bomb (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.

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

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".

They started posting their articles to Facebook while they were down. http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/14/4621324/new-york-times-pub...

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

Makes sense. Nobody as large as NYT organization would do their maintenance during weekday morning hours. So there must be another behind-the-scene story altogether.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com