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StackOverflow Is Down

59 points| agluszak | 3 years ago |stackstatus.net | reply

52 comments

order
[+] ctvo|3 years ago|reply
SE has been an incredibly well ran company.

- FREE

- Permissive content license

- Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer

- Few / limited ads

- Data available at archive.org

- Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof.

I think about LinkedIn, Github, ... the other large platforms we use for work, and SE is the only one that hasn't gone downhill.

No, I don't want them to open source the platform. No, I don't think you can do better. Yes, a few mirrors for redundancy would be excellent, but not urgent. Discoverability here would be the challenge for mirrors. They've been down less than a day total for me in 10+ years of using them.

[+] donmcronald|3 years ago|reply
> Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer

The cookie dialog being different on every site is infuriating if you’re not logged in.

[+] motbus3|3 years ago|reply
I hope they are financially well because it is one of the few online things I think it works.

it is only bad they are having some many outages these days. I am not complaining for me. but it means something is happening there

[+] blacklight|3 years ago|reply
And this is at least the 4th or 5th time within 10 days that either the website is down or performance is badly degraded.

So bad for a website that is basically the go-to resource where IT professionals get their answers.

So bad that the whole platform is closed-source, so we can't even spin multiple instances.

The main resource used by developers and sysadmins around the world is locked and centralized, and when that central place goes down all the answers go down with it.

We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

And, most of all, we need alternatives that are open and decentralized, and we need them right now.

[+] someguy5344523|3 years ago|reply
> We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

I think that's already the case. Whenever I look up a technical issue, the first result is usually from SO; the next results are usually from websites that copied that first SO page

[+] amanj41|3 years ago|reply
If you use brave browser it usually is able to point you to corresponding web archive pages when SO is down. Nice to have it directly integrated into the browser
[+] Pengtuzi|3 years ago|reply
> we'll do the scraping for them

Awesome! Let us know when we can start using your new open source service, it must be mirrored and need it right now.

[+] pugworthy|3 years ago|reply
I’m not trying to be funny but it’s interesting how much panic one can read in the parent comment.

We all joke about the dependency on SO. It seems to actually be more true than perhaps we’d like to admit.

[+] ankaAr|3 years ago|reply
It could sound like a joke, but when I applied years ago to be a sysadmin for an Antartica base, they let me travel with whatever I want.

My first option was a full copy of stackoverflow. No joke.

Now, I'm reading this 5 hours letter and everything is ok, but what a wonderful site.

[+] connordoner|3 years ago|reply
For anyone looking on this from the future, the error page has Content-Type set to text/html but literally returns the text: "The service is unavailable." and a newline character.
[+] msoad|3 years ago|reply 

        *   Trying 151.101.1.69:80...
        * Connected to stackoverflow.com (151.101.1.69) port 80 (#0)
        > GET / HTTP/1.1
        > Host: stackoverflow.com
        > User-Agent: curl/7.79.1
        > Accept: */*
        > 
        * Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
        < HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
        < content-type: text/html
        < Content-Length: 27
        < Accept-Ranges: bytes
        < Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2022 14:58:39 GMT
        < Via: 1.1 varnish
        < Connection: keep-alive
        < X-Served-By: cache-lga21957-LGA
        < X-Cache: MISS
        < X-Cache-Hits: 0
        < X-Timer: S1659538719.045867,VS0,VE2
        < Vary: Fastly-SSL
        < X-DNS-Prefetch-Control: off
        < Set-Cookie: prov=f6b7f757-544e-1afc-3cc2-e13af9fc8932; domain=.stackoverflow.com; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2055 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly
        < 
        * Connection #0 to host stackoverflow.com left intact
        The service is unavailable.⏎
[+] racl101|3 years ago|reply
You mean I gotta start thinking on my own?

Not sure that will work.

[+] coffeeblack|3 years ago|reply
I am using the Stackoverflow Keyboard. How am I supposed to type code now?
[+] mproud|3 years ago|reply
Time to take a long lunch. Hopefully it’ll be back soon, otherwise I’ll have to invent a reason to give to my boss on why I can’t get back to the office!
[+] jollyllama|3 years ago|reply
So what is their stack, or where can I find more about it? A totally custom webserver? Someone commented to this effect the yesterday [1], but I couldn't find much in the way of a good writeup, except this answer from 2009 [2].

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321726 2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackove...

[+] bakje|3 years ago|reply
Not specifically stackoverflow, but here is an answer on stackexchange [1] listing many of the parts that make up their stack.

I'm assuming stackoverflow runs as a part of all this, and not separately.

1 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370

[+] brightball|3 years ago|reply
I remember hearing that they are a .NET stack with C# and SQL Server.

The only reason I know that is because I was working at a company and discussing the issues the company was running into scaling SQL Server and Stack Overflow was used as a counter example of SQL Server scalability. It lead into a long discussion of caching on high read workloads.

I'll never touch SQL Server again if I can help it.

[+] kadonoishi|3 years ago|reply
builtwith.com gives a lot of information, although the results page comes back with a "Misleading Technology Profile Warning".
[+] hokkos|3 years ago|reply
Finally we can't thanks the spam copies, they assure the vital service of caching the site when it goes down.
[+] mellosouls|3 years ago|reply
It had the same issue the other day, at least for a few minutes, so possibly an ongoing glitch?
[+] pkstn|3 years ago|reply
They're having stack overflow?
[+] iostream25|3 years ago|reply
Cue jokes like "... and today was 32% less productive for developers worldwide"
[+] Victerius|3 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] ollien|3 years ago|reply
I know you're joking, but an SE employee (I believe it was Nick Craver, who is now a former SE SRE) mentioned on Twitter a while ago that employees use database backups and spin up local instances for exactly this reason...
[+] iasay|3 years ago|reply
They wouldn't find a solution because all the good answers were moderated away into oblivion :D