IMPORTANT: Today's update failed and we have had to restore a backup, but we did not lose data

[EarlG]

As most of you know, today we attempted to update some of our software to a new version. We first performed the update on our test site, and after observing that everything was running smoothly, we updated the main site. It was at this point that we ran into issues, because the main site slowed to a crawl.

After investigating, we discovered that the latest version of the software involves some significant -- and unanticipated -- technical changes to the way DU works behind the scenes. Unfortunately these changes were not included in the documentation because, as we discovered too late, they would "only affect a handful of users." Yup, we are one of those users. This means we have to resolve this particular issue before we can continue with the update.

In order to bring the site back we had to restore a backup, but the good news is that because the backup was taken right before the update happened, we did not have to go back to an older version, and we were able to recover everything.

We are very sorry about the service interruption which, unfortunately, ended up being for nothing today. The good news is that we are now back to normal. We are back in our original configuration, so things should work correctly as of now. We expect that there will be some initial slowness as the restoration process continues -- you may notice it when first arriving at the site, but it should clear up fairly quickly.

We do still need to perform this software update, but we are now well aware of these specific issues which caused our last attempt to fail. We will not be attempting this update again immediately, but it should happens sometime within the next few weeks, and we are optimistic that our next attempt will be much more successful.

Once again, I apologize for today's downtime. Although we knew that this would be a challenging update, it's rare for us to run into a significant issue like this, so we're really disappointed that we weren't able to get everything squared away as intended today.

I'll update you again when we have more information about our next attempt to perform the update.

Thanks for your patience,

EarlG