backend errors

[denise]

Someone reminded me we hadn't made a top-level post about the "backend fetch error" that people have been getting in the evenings -- this is a problem related to site load. (It's also related to the increase in abusive traffic we've been seeing over the last several months or so, and we're not the only ones who've been noticing it; there's been a general internet-wide upswing in garbage lately.)

We're doing our very best to keep legitimate site usage from noticing the problem. When you get any kind of site capacity related error, wait a few minutes and try again: our systems have a number of ways to automatically fix the problems, but it takes a few minutes for them to get more capacity online. Sometimes it can also take a few rounds of "add more capacity, see if that fixes the problem" for the issue to fully resolve. We've been looking into long-term fixes that we can make to reduce the amount of garbage traffic we're getting and the chance that it will overwhelm our capacity, but we're already getting feedback from legitimate site users that the traffic filtering steps we're taking are causing issues accessing the site for them, and we're trying to avoid making that problem worse.

We're really sorry about the hassle! Things may be a little rocky in the evenings US time for the next week or two as we work to find the best long-term solutions, because evening in the US is both a higher period of legitimate activity for us (because of our high number of US users) and a higher period of abusive traffic (because it's the beginning of the day in the countries we get the most abusive traffic from). If you do get an error, waiting 3-5 minutes and trying again should resolve it.