Ask HN: How come Disqus goes down all the time?

Growth pains. Last couple of days were especially difficult because we're in the process of upgrading our hardware and optimizing architecture. But everything is going to be much, much faster in a matter of days.

The downtime issues Disqus has had in the last few days can be attributed to maintenance being done to the database. It's been an unfortunate combination of load and unexpected problems arising while upgrading our servers.

Summed up it is growth pains, but fortunately pains that we know how to address immediately. I am hoping that after this week most of our maintenance bumps will be smoothed out. Much apologies for the performance hiccups.

We have a service status page here which is updated frequently: http://status.disqus.com/

This is totally unrelated to this post, but I also found that accessing pages with disqus on greasemonkey enabled firefox caused firefox to crash. The last time I managed to reproduce this it was on Firefox 3.5.1. Then I moved to minefield and the problem did not occur. This also happens to be a one-off case as I could not find others with the same issue.