7 ms·

StackOverflow Is Down

59 points by agluszak 4y ago

Victerius 4y ago
- ollien 4y ago
  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...
  - zshrdlu 4y ago
    Sounds a lot less straight-forward than using the cached result from Google or acrhive.org...
- iasay 4y ago
  They wouldn't find a solution because all the good answers were moderated away into oblivion :D
  - mwint 4y ago
    I’ll undelete any good answer you link to here.
    - mark-r 4y ago
      The biggest tragedy is good answers to bad questions. The answer might teach you something you never knew before, but if the question is judged harshly it might get deleted or hidden in search results.
connordoner 4y ago
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 4y ago
  * 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.⏎
- ravenstine 4y ago
  That's valid HTML.
  - goto11 4y ago
    A title-element is required for the HTML to be valid. It is the only required element AFAIK.
mellosouls 4y ago
It had the same issue the other day, at least for a few minutes, so possibly an ongoing glitch?
JLCarveth 4y ago
They were down for several hours a week ago. It seems they've been having some sustained issues maybe? https://twitter.com/StackStatus/ https://twitter.com/StackStatus/
jollyllama 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321726 2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackoverflow-optimise-the-performance-for-the-display-of-the-questions/1464847#1464847 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackove...
- brightball 4y ago
  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.
- bakje 4y ago
  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 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370
- kadonoishi 4y ago
  builtwith.com gives a lot of information, although the results page comes back with a "Misleading Technology Profile Warning".
- dixie_land 4y ago
  https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-technical-deconstruction/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-tech...
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Excellent, thank you. "Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching - 2019 Edition" is particularly informative.
blacklight 4y ago
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.
- amanj41 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  > 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.
- knowhy 4y ago
  I think stack exchange provides data dumps via archive.org https://archive.org/download/stackexchange https://archive.org/download/stackexchange
- zufallsheld 4y ago
  Stackoverflow's data is cc-by-sa 4.0 licensed and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So nothing is stopping anyone to spin-up multiple instances.
  - mark-r 4y ago
    It's much harder to work with the data if you don't have the code. SO is not open source.
racl101 4y ago
You mean I gotta start thinking on my own? Not sure that will work.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  I am using the Stackoverflow Keyboard. How am I supposed to type code now?
  - drewzero1 4y ago
    I had a good laugh, thanks. Never knew that was a thing[1] but it totally made my day. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-with-this-one-weird-click/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-...
- nfhshy68 4y ago
- mproud 4y ago
  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!
Candas1 4y ago
hokkos 4y ago
Finally we can't thanks the spam copies, they assure the vital service of caching the site when it goes down.
uhhhhuhyes 4y ago
ctvo 4y ago
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.
- vdchuyen 4y ago
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  > "Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof." Owned by a VC firm, isn't it? https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-18-billion-acquisition-of-stack-overflow-aims-to-turbocharge-the-worlds-software-knowhow/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-1... after https://vcnewsdaily.com/stack-overflow/venture-capital-funding/hprvrwtdhx https://vcnewsdaily.com/stack-overflow/venture-capital-fundi...
  - ctvo 4y ago
    You're right. That makes me very sad.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
  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
pkstn 4y ago
They're having stack overflow?
ankaAr 4y ago
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.
iostream25 4y ago
Cue jokes like "... and today was 32% less productive for developers worldwide"

59 points by agluszak 4y ago

ollien 4y ago
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...
- zshrdlu 4y ago
  Sounds a lot less straight-forward than using the cached result from Google or acrhive.org...
iasay 4y ago
They wouldn't find a solution because all the good answers were moderated away into oblivion :D
- mwint 4y ago
  I’ll undelete any good answer you link to here.
  - mark-r 4y ago
    The biggest tragedy is good answers to bad questions. The answer might teach you something you never knew before, but if the question is judged harshly it might get deleted or hidden in search results.

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 4y ago
* 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.⏎
ravenstine 4y ago
That's valid HTML.
- goto11 4y ago
  A title-element is required for the HTML to be valid. It is the only required element AFAIK.

mellosouls 4y ago

It had the same issue the other day, at least for a few minutes, so possibly an ongoing glitch?

JLCarveth 4y ago

They were down for several hours a week ago. It seems they've been having some sustained issues maybe? https://twitter.com/StackStatus/ https://twitter.com/StackStatus/

jollyllama 4y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321726 2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackoverflow-optimise-the-performance-for-the-display-of-the-questions/1464847#1464847 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackove...

brightball 4y ago
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.
bakje 4y ago
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 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370
kadonoishi 4y ago
builtwith.com gives a lot of information, although the results page comes back with a "Misleading Technology Profile Warning".
dixie_land 4y ago
https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-technical-deconstruction/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-tech...
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Excellent, thank you. "Stack Overflow: How We Do App Caching - 2019 Edition" is particularly informative.

blacklight 4y ago

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.

amanj41 4y ago
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 4y ago
> 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.
knowhy 4y ago
I think stack exchange provides data dumps via archive.org https://archive.org/download/stackexchange https://archive.org/download/stackexchange
zufallsheld 4y ago
Stackoverflow's data is cc-by-sa 4.0 licensed and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange So nothing is stopping anyone to spin-up multiple instances.
- mark-r 4y ago
  It's much harder to work with the data if you don't have the code. SO is not open source.

racl101 4y ago

You mean I gotta start thinking on my own? Not sure that will work.

coffeeblack 4y ago
I am using the Stackoverflow Keyboard. How am I supposed to type code now?
- drewzero1 4y ago
  I had a good laugh, thanks. Never knew that was a thing[1] but it totally made my day. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-with-this-one-weird-click/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-...
nfhshy68 4y ago
mproud 4y ago
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!

Candas1 4y ago

hokkos 4y ago

Finally we can't thanks the spam copies, they assure the vital service of caching the site when it goes down.

uhhhhuhyes 4y ago

ctvo 4y ago

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.

vdchuyen 4y ago
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof." Owned by a VC firm, isn't it? https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-18-billion-acquisition-of-stack-overflow-aims-to-turbocharge-the-worlds-software-knowhow/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/vijaygurbaxani/2021/06/08/the-1... after https://vcnewsdaily.com/stack-overflow/venture-capital-funding/hprvrwtdhx https://vcnewsdaily.com/stack-overflow/venture-capital-fundi...
- ctvo 4y ago
  You're right. That makes me very sad.
donmcronald 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
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

pkstn 4y ago

They're having stack overflow?

ankaAr 4y ago

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.

iostream25 4y ago

Cue jokes like "... and today was 32% less productive for developers worldwide"