Ancestry.com Blog » Site Status

Temporary website problems earlier today (now resolved)

David Graham — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:50:09 +0000

We experienced some temporary issues on the site earlier today that may have caused errors when trying to log in or when using other portions of the website. We worked to resolve these problems as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. We believe these issues lasted less than an hour.

If you ran into errors on the site because of this, they should be fully resolved now. If you continue to experience errors we recommend that you close your internet browser and try coming back to the site using a new browser window. Thank you for your patience as we work to make sure the site is running smoothly for you.

Brief down time due to site maintenance

David Graham — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:29:50 +0000

We just completed some site maintenance to replace a piece of faulty hardware and briefly experienced some unanticipated site down time because of this (roughly 1 AM Mountain Daylight time or 7 AM GMT). This has now been resolved and we apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused. If you had any troubles accessing the site, you should be able to access it again now. Thank you for your patience as we work to improve our services for you.

Scheduled site maintenance (8 April 2009, 1-3 AM MDT)

David Graham — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:35:51 +0000

We just wanted to let everyone know that the Ancestry.com site will undergo scheduled maintenance on Wednesday, 8 April 2009, from 1 AM to 3 AM Mountain Daylight Time. We do not expect this to cause any site problems or downtime, but it is possible that some portions of the site may be unavailable during this time. We apologize for not posting this notice sooner and will work to give a bit more advanced notice next time. Thanks for your patience as we work to make sure the site is running smoothly.

Update about temporary site problems this morning

David Graham — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:05:56 +0000

As an update to our previous post, we wanted to let everyone know that we have resolved many of the issues we were experiencing on the site this morning. In general the homepage should load properly for you.

The two temporary exceptions are the Quick Links and To-do sections. For now, these two sections will not display the links and to-do items that you have added in the past. Your information is not lost, but is simply not able to be displayed temporarily. We are working to fix this as quickly as possible.

It is possible that you may also see other occasional problems on the site as we are continuing to work on these issues. Thank you again for your patience.

Temporary site problems

David Graham — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:25:09 +0000

We wanted to let everyone know that we are having some temporary site problems this morning that we are actively working on. The primary error you may notice is getting a message on the homepage when you are logged-in to the site stating “Everything has been removed from your page.” We expect this and any other errors you run into this morning to just be temporary. In the meantime, if your homepage is not loading properly, please simply use the tabs at the top of the screen to navigate to the different areas of the site.

Again, we are actively working to get this resolved and will post an update when it is corrected. Thank you for your patience.

Site Maintenance Wednesday morning

Eric Shoup — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:57:54 +0000

The first two parts of our 3-part upgrade of the Member Trees system have completed without requiring any downtime.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we are spending a lot of effort behind-the-scenes to upgrade this system so that it will continue to meet customer needs as it grows. As part of this effort, we will be upgrading some software on the servers that house this system. These servers also support Genealogy.com and Rootsweb.com.

The third and most involved piece of the upgrade will occur early Wednesday morning from 12 to 8am MST. During this part of the upgrade we anticipate the following impacts:

Genealogy.com – Whole site will be down from 12 to 8am MST
Rootsweb.com & Ancestry.com – Rootsweb’s WorldConnect and its sister database, Ancestry World Tree, will be down from 12 to 8am MST

Just to repeat, the outages related to Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com will be limited to the WorldConnect and Ancestry World Tree systems only. Ancestry Member Trees (our main tree system) will not be impacted.

This is part 3 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – COMPLETE

Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST — COMPLETE

Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST

Regards

Eric Shoup

Site Maintenance Tuesday morning

Eric Shoup — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:09:07 +0000

The first part of our 3-part upgrade of the Member Trees system completed successfully on Friday without requiring any downtime.

As I mentioned last week, we are spending a lot of effort behind-the-scenes to upgrade this system so that it will continue to meet customer needs as it grows. As part of this effort, we will be upgrading some software on the servers that house this system. These servers also support Genealogy.com and Rootsweb.com.

We will perform the second part of this upgrade early Tuesday morning from 12 to 8am MST. We may determine that we need to take down Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and/or Rootsweb.com but at this point we do not anticipate having to do so. It is possible that during the 3am to 8am MST timeframe on Tuesday you may see some degraded performance of the Trees system.

This is part 2 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – COMPLETE

Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 8:00 a.m. MST

Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

I will post again to notify you about part 3.

Regards

Eric Shoup

Planned Maintenance this Friday morning

Eric Shoup — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:05:18 +0000

Our online Member Trees system continues to grow extremely fast. We are spending a lot of effort behind-the-scenes to upgrade this system so that it will continue to meet customer needs as it grows. As part of this effort, we will be upgrading some software on the servers that house this system. These servers also support Genealogy.com and Rootsweb.com.

During the maintenance window we may determine that we need to take down Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com and/or Rootsweb.com but at this point we do not anticipate having to do so.

This is part 1 of 3 planned maintenance windows to complete this upgrade:

Part 1 – Friday, 20 February 2009 – 1:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

Part 2 – Tuesday, 24 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

Part 3 – Wednesday, 25 February 2009 – 12:00 – 3:00 a.m. MST

I will post again to notify you of parts 2 & 3 as we get closer.

Regards

Eric Shoup

Planned Maintenance this Saturday morning (2/7)

Eric Shoup — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:43:44 +0000

I posted this week about last Saturday’s planned maintenance and the issues that ensued. Our data center provider has corrected the problem they experienced last week and will proceed with their planned maintenance this weekend.

Maintenance will begin on Friday, 6 February 2009 at midnight (MST) and finish on Saturday, 7 February 2009 at 8:00 a.m (MST). This maintenance windows is in effect for all Ancestry sites. Assuming everything goes as planned, this maintenance should not impact your site experience at all. I wanted to let you know this was happening but, again, we do not expect it to impact the operation of any of our Ancestry sites.

regards,

Eric Shoup

Site Maintenance last Saturday morning

Eric Shoup — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:48:35 +0000

Our data center provider performed routine maintenance on their infrastructure between midnight and 6am Saturday morning. Due to some unexpected issues that arose related to this maintenance, we took protective actions to take a bank of servers offline. Other companies hosted in that facility did the same. As a result, parts of our Ancestry sites were down from 1:05am to 5:45am MST on Saturday morning while the servers were being brought back online.

Sorry for the delay in getting this information out to you as well as any inconvenience this may have caused.

Regards

Eric Shoup
VP Product