OMG! Disqus Outage

posted by jangro on (3 years, 8 months ago)

There was a pretty major outage this morning at Disqus. Those of us who are using their Javascript plugin, comments simply disappeared from our blogs. Those of us who are using the beta plugin that puts the comments into the page on the back-end had some ugly PHP warnings.

Disabling the plugin will bring back the old school wordpress comments. That's better than errors. It would be nice if the plugin could detect a problem and do this automatically.

I hope it wasn't one of the new guys who broke it!.

In all seriousness, I hate to see this sort of thing, not only because I'm using it, but because I've been such a big proponent of this service.

The fact of the matter is when you rely on a third party service for anything, there's a real possibility that there will be some downtime. Sooner or later there will be an outage. I don't think it lasted for more than an hour or two, which isn't so bad, but I'm not sure how many more of these they have before users start to get really worried. Daniel Ha, being the communicative guy that he is, will surely have an explanation.

More importantly, events like this should remind us that these things will happen and it's just smart to plan for something even worse than a few hours of downtime: Data loss.

While we'd all like to think that a service like Disqus has bulletproof backups, do yourself a favor and set up a process to export all of your comments on a regular basis. In the even of catastrophe, you won't lose your valuable blog comments.

I need to do this myself, and if I come up with an automated process, I'll post it.


Comments & Reactions

  • jangro saved this to Blogging 3 years, 8 months ago

  • Posted by Mike Olbinski 3 years, 8 months ago

    I was writing a blog on Pop Critics about us moving to Disqus next week, and when I went to find your registration link, the site was down :)

    I was like....ummm...is this a sign?

    And I decided to ignore it, because like the author says, these things happen.

    reply

  • Posted by Mike Olbinski 3 years, 8 months ago

    Hmmm, why doesn't my avatar appear here? Is this the same Gravatar issue that prevents Avatars from showing up correctly in some places?

    reply
  • jangro

    Posted by jangro 3 years, 8 months ago

    I see your avatar Mike.

    reply

  • Posted by Mike Olbinski 3 years, 8 months ago

    Okay, strange, it showed up with a question mark at first.

    Thanks man. The only other thing is it doesn't show up next to the Post as button below this box. I just get the gray smiley thing.

    reply

  • Posted by Daniel Ha 3 years, 8 months ago

    Mike, this is because the older API plugin is being used on this website. A new version is on its way.

    reply
  • jangro

    Posted by jangro 3 years, 8 months ago

    It happens to the best of them Daniel. Amazon's been down for about an hour now!

    reply
  • jangro

    Posted by jangro 3 years, 8 months ago

    duh, I was looking on disqus.com' href='http://disqus.com">disqus.com'>http://disqus.com">disqus.com when I saw your avatar. Daniel's cleared it up.

    waiting for the new API plugin... :)

    reply

  • Posted by Mike Olbinski 3 years, 8 months ago

    Ah, okay...that makes sense.

    reply

  • Posted by Mike Olbinski 3 years, 8 months ago

    Woh! It is down, how crazy :)

    reply

  • Posted by Daniel Ha 3 years, 8 months ago

    Hi, sorry about the issues this morning.

    We wrote a post here: http://blog.disqus.net/2008/06/06/issues-this-m...' href='http://blog.disqus.net/2008/06/06/issues-this-morning-what-why-and-what-now/">http://blog.disqus.net/2008/06/06/issues-this-m...'>http://blog.disqus.net/2008/06/06/issues-this-morning-what-why-and-what-now/">http://blog.disqus.net/2008/06/06/issues-this-m...

    reply

  • Posted by StephARC 3 years, 8 months ago

    As long as my comments are back then no one gets hurt.

    reply

  • Posted by Jason A Clark 3 years, 8 months ago

    This makes me both happy and sad. I am happy because everything is back up and running and sad because it was back up before I even knew it was down... No, wait, that's a good thing too...

    reply

  • Posted by links for 2008-06-26 | iKeif 3 years, 7 months ago

    [...] Way cool.Accessible calendars [dive into mark] 3 hours agoUsing the oft-misunderstood table tag...OMG! Disqus Outage | Jangro.com 12 hours agoThis is ONE of the reasons I'm hesitant about using this service. ou don't get your [...]

    reply

  • Posted by Launch Tree 2 years, 9 months ago

    It sucks when software goes wrong like that. Unfortunately speaking from a programmers perspective it seems almost impossible to avoid. No matter how many times you test a feature it always somehow manages to break when you release it :(

    reply

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