Around 1AM PDT on Thursday, our network of sites went down due to a large failure at the Northern Virginia data center of Amazon, where its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) product is held. Being a pretty popular provider of cloud-based storage, the shutdown also took down several other high-profile websites, including Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora.
Although it would be easy to directly pass the buck onto Amazon for our downtime, we've been extremely happy with them over the years and realize things like this happen from time to time. The Whiskey Media "Top Men" take pride in our architecture and our ability to provide a stable environment for you to goof off with on the Internet.
That said, downtime is downtime, and many of you are paying us for premium access. To make amends we're extending all paid accounts three extra days to make up for the downtime. There's nothing you need to do, you'll just get billed three days later than normal. We can now confidently say that through this act Whiskey Media is the next World of Warcraft killer. Take notice, Blizzard.
As a behind-the-scenes aside, know that we have pretty reliable backup systems for your data. Not only do we keep live slave databases available but also do nightly backups of all the sites, just in case anything extremely bad ever happens. Point being, we've got enough replication to get back up and running fairly quickly in case of an emergency.
Now if this was a SkyNet thing... well, come find us at Coit Tower, and let the resistance begin. Thank you all for your support during the time off. The Whiskey Media community really shined the past couple of days. Our tech team learned a lot from this outage and we'll likely be doing a more in depth breakdown of just exactly what happened on the Whiskey Media blog later this week.
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