Scheduled Maintenance on Wednesday, March 27 [Resolved and Updated 3/28]

We will be performing some planned maintenance on the Ning Platform on Wednesday, March 27, from 10pm-1am Pacific Time (that's 0500-0800 GMT on March 28). During this time, all Ning Networks will be offline and will display branded maintenance pages. Ning.com and Creators will be down for maintenance as well.

During our maintenance last month, we were unable to complete a crucial component of our original plan, which involves removing our reliance on certain hardware so that we can take advantage of new cloud-based technologies. While that maintenance ended earlier than expected as a result, we need to schedule another maintenance window this month to complete it. We strive to keep planned maintenance windows like these to a minimum and schedule them for low-traffic hours.

During this 3-hour maintenance window:

Your Ning Network will display a maintenance page matching your current theme customization to let your members know that your community is temporarily unavailable.
We will update the Ning Status Blog when this maintenance begins and ends.
Creators will also be down for maintenance. We'll update here and on the Status Blog when the maintenance is complete.

Not sure when 10pm Pacific is in your time zone? Use Every Time Zone to find out!

You may want to let your members know about this downtime in advance via a Broadcast Message or notice on the Main Page of your network. Feel free to make use of the language below, filling in your network details.

Formal: We will be performing maintenance on [network_name] on Wednesday, March 27 between 10pm and 1am Pacific Time. During this time, [network_name] will be unavailable. We hope this won’t be too much of an inconvenience as we work to perform some necessary upgrades.

Informal: Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we need to perform some simple but necessary maintenance on [network_name] on Wednesday, March 27. We’ll need to take the site down at 10 p.m. Pacific for about 3 hours during which we’ll simply show a message asking folks to check back later. Thanks in advance for your patience while we tune up the site!

We've also sent this information via email to all Network Creators with an active subscription.

Update 3/28: This maintenance is complete, but we ran into a snag while coming out of maintenance early this morning (around 1am Pacific Time) that extended the downtime experienced by Ning Networks. While preparing to come out of our planned maintenance, we experienced a hardware failure that forced us to terminate all active processes, then restart them manually. This lengthy process had the unfortunate effect of extending the overall length of the maintenance period significantly, and we were not fully out of maintenance until approximate 4:30 am Pacific Time.

Replies

Dr Husky (Emalejandro) March 28, 2013 at 4:37pm

very thanks for the advise
Dan Andersen March 28, 2013 at 9:16am

I'm not able to upload images this morning, just get place holders. Every time there is maintenance, there is a side effect. I don't get it. : (
- Dan Andersen > Dan Andersen March 28, 2013 at 9:23am
  
  Never mind, seems to work now, it was with 3 different browsers tho. Had to be a glitch.
  
  ggrrrr
Allison Leahy March 28, 2013 at 9:10am

So sorry you missed it! We sent the email out on the 21st--it was titled "Scheduled Maintenance for your Ning Network."

This maintenance announcement is visible from the dashboard of your network, but we understand many Network Creators don't log in regularly and/or don't pay much attention to the dashboard, so we broadcasted this information via email, on Creators, and all of our social channels as well. Again, sorry it caught your community unawares, Bon. Things should be back to normal now.
Aaron March 27, 2013 at 9:42pm

Hi everyone,

One final reminder that this maintenance is about to start (we'll get it going in about 15 minutes). We'll keep the Status Blog updated with progress, and I'll post here again when we're back online.

—Aaron
- Aaron > Aaron March 28, 2013 at 4:42am
  
  Hi all,
  
  This maintenance went much longer than we had anticipated. Our team will be doing a post-mortem on what went wrong, but for now I just wanted to let you know networks are coming back online.
  
  —Aaron
  - complience > Aaron March 28, 2013 at 4:57am
    
    Hi Aaron
    
    Thanks for the update..
    
    We are expecting alot of traffic on our site this weekend.
    
    Can you provide any reassurances ning will be available?
    - Aaron > complience March 28, 2013 at 9:12am
      
      complience,
      
      We don't have any scheduled maintenance for the foreseeable future.
      
      —Aaron
Gail March 27, 2013 at 10:15am

Is there anything else going on with Ning? I was in this morning but now no matter what browser I use I get an invalid url message.
- Aaron > Gail March 27, 2013 at 10:23am
  
  Gail,
  
  This maintenance doesn't start for about 12 hours, and there aren't any platform-wide issues right now. Have you sent our team a ticket? If so, let me know the number and we'll get it sorted quickly.
  
  —Aaron

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