Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.
Our monitoring shows that both sites went offline soon after 9 p.m. CET (3 p.m. US EST).
The connection between the two? Both are owned by Live Universe, whose site is also unavailable.
The outage is apparently not supposed to be permanent, but something has definitely gone very wrong. Last Friday Live Universe told CNET that the sites would be back within a few hours.
We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has “lots of servers.” Greenspan also said that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.
Again, that was three days ago and the sites are still not back up.
Frustrated users
There is something to be said for user communication here. There doesn’t appear to have been any warnings to the users that the sites would go offline, and no temporary information page has been set up (the sites simply don’t respond at all).
An outage of this magnitude, even if is due to a data center migration, is bound to put a big dent in the trust that users have in these services. To name but one example, Twitter has been abuzz with messages from confused and upset users since the sites went down (try searching Twitter for “Revver down” or “Pageflakes down”).
Past problems
It should be mentioned that both Revver and Pageflakes have had stability issues for some time now. Prior to the sites going offline last Thursday, Pageflakes had accumulated more than 22 hours of downtime in January alone, and Revver had accumulated more than 32 hours. We wrote about Revver’s ongoing problems just two weeks ago.
These problems may perhaps be what prompted the migration to a different data center, but whatever the reason, users are bound to be frustrated by the sudden absence of these sites.
Do you have information?
If anyone has any additional information as to what is going on with the migration, please leave a comment.
Update:
Pageflakes came back online at 1:42 p.m. CET (7:42 a.m. US EST) after having been down for 3 days, 16 hours and 26 minutes.
Revver is still down, though.
Update 2:
Revver started to come back online at 4:22 p.m. CET (10 a.m. US EST) on Monday, just over 2.5 hours after Pageflakes came back, though availability was very patchy initially. The site has been unavailable several short periods since then, sometimes responding with HTTP error 500 (internal server error), and sometimes the DNS lookup hasn’t worked.
