LiveJournal was unavailable for 2 hours and 45 minutes yesterday, Tuesday, while the social network migrated to a new server facility.

The migration seems to have started just after 5 p.m. CET (11 a.m. US EST), which is when the site went down.

Directly following the migration, the website was significantly slower than normal for some time, something which was also explained as a side effect of the migration on the LiveJournal status page:

LiveJournal was down today for a period of time due to migration to a new server facility. We’re back now. As the site comes back up pages may load slowly; this is expected and should resolve within the next few hours. If you are seeing this page instead of the normal www.livejournal.com site, then your local machine or DNS server is caching old information. Please try rebooting your machine to fix the problem. If that does not work, you should either contact your ISP or wait for their DNS servers to get updated.

It took approximately eight hours before the website’s performance was back to normal.

LiveJournal normally has excellent availability and has a 99.87% uptime so far in 2008 (a total of 10 hours of downtime). Before the downtime yesterday the site had a 99.90% uptime (reaching the coveted “three nines”). It will be interesting to see how LiveJournal will perform in their new data center.

The data in this article is from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. The load time in the graph refers to the time it took to contact the site and download the HTML page only, not including images or other external elements.

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