dw_maintenance | Crossposting to LJ

As many people have noticed, crossposting to LJ has been sort of hit-or-miss for the past few days. This is because LJ has been having some site slowness and periods of unreachability (their status page says that they're still working on restoring access for everyone).

If you get a failure message in your Dreamwidth inbox, just wait a little while, then edit the entry. Make sure the crosspost box is ticked, then save the entry again. It should re-attempt to crosspost at that time. (You may need to try a few times, or wait until access to LJ is more reliable.)

In the meantime, the site slowness last night and tonight isn't due to any sort of load -- there's been a process that gets stuck at that time of night, eating up the available CPU. We're working on figuring out what's causing the problem so that it doesn't keep happening.

EDIT: LiveJournal just posted the following statement on their status page:

We can now publicly disclose that we have been experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack the last two days, which has been the reason for the site issues most users have been experiencing. The traffic load has been immense, at many times our normal load level, and the attack is still on-going. We are in constant contact with our providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. Thank you!

So, it's likely that crossposting and importing to and from LJ will continue to be hit-or-miss, until they're able to either completely mitigate the DDoS traffic or the DDoS stops. We wish them good luck in dealing with this crap!

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Status updates are love! Thank you for this post. :)

Thanks for telling us what happened.

Sam

Thanks for this! At least now I know it's not just me being daft. :)

Thanks for the explanations. LJ is a very up and down experience at present (more down than up, in truth! :o)

Man, it seems like everyone's having site slowness atm. It's happening to a couple of other sites I go to as well. Weird. Thanks for letting us know what's going on.

Thanx for explaining.

Dropping a comment here, as it may be relevant to the interests of users who are having trouble cross-posting (and otherwise using LJ):

charmian has gathered some links that would appear to shed some light on the underlying causes of the LJ downtime.

*nod* I heard rumors, but it's generally considered a bad idea to mention that a DDoS is in progress until you've got your mitigation protocol in place, and since I hadn't heard any official statements I didn't want to include that here either. (Although

charmian has links to official statements on the Russian-language side of LJ, so I'm guessing the English-language statements will be coming out as soon as people get into the office today.)

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dynamite_lady - 2011-07-27 11:18 (UTC) - Expand

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epifaniociro - 2011-08-10 02:57 (UTC) - Expand

Thanks for letting us know!

I had to find out the reason I haven't been able to get on LJ for four days now from DW!
Yet another reason why I jumped ship. Thank you so much for this info.

LJ has actually been really good at updating their status page (http://status.livejournal.org) throughout -- they just didn't mention specifically that it was a DDoS, because it's generally considered a bad idea in the industry to acknowledge that you're under DDoS (it gives the attackers attention, which is partially what they're after!) I'm guessing it got bad enough that they don't see any point in not mentioning it anymore ...

Dealing with a DDoS sucks, and it's nearly impossible to handle without affecting some legit traffic, as well. I wish them loads of luck in getting this sorted out.

tommyelf - 2011-07-27 16:29 (UTC) - Expand

Thank you for the update! I was worried that there was potentially a DoS attack going on that was targeting both DW and LJ. Good luck debugging the nightly process.

And status.livejournal.org now confirms what they've got a massive DDoS, as of my last look just now.

I hope that DW only has minor code problems!

Thanks so much for this post; I've been increasingly frustrated with inability to get to LJ, made worse by their infrequent updates to the status page (1x/day feels insufficient, especially 3 days in....).

Thanks for letting us know. I wasn't surprised crossposting is failing because I can't get my clients to log into LJ.

Thank you for the post!

Thanks! It was driving me a little nuts.

Thanks for keeping us updated. I <3 DW.

Thank you for the update - I suspected as much, but it's good to know for sure. By the way, you lot are outstanding, and I don't remember to say that because, well, when everything runs smoothly, there's nothing to say. :)

It's always nice to hear, though -- thank you!

Had been trying the "edit and see if cross-post goes through" method periodically, still no dice. But I've also had really random and intermittent success/failure with being able to read/see things over at LJ.

Thanks for acknowledging what's going on-- I suspect, for a lot of us, that kind of check-in is why we're here, and trying to leave there!

Thanks for the update! I had no idea what was happening on LJ, and it's kinda sad that I had to hear the reason for the log-in troubles from DW. Another bulletpoint for my 'why DW rocks more than LJ' list. Stay awesome you guys!

thanks for explaining what's going on!

Thanks for the update, my LJ is not working since Monday. It sucks, but I hope they fix it really quickly.

Thanks for telling us. I'd been a bit worried when DW was slow too.

M

Thank you for this update.

Dayem, another attack on LJ? This bodes badly for the future of the innertubez, especially when all the services start charging for time, as Comcast already has.

Love, C.

Another reason of why I'm glad I back my journal up on here, thanks DW. :)

How odd. When I went to the status.livejournal.com page, all I saw was the generic message about getting the site back online, no mention of the DDoS attack. Maybe I need to clear out my cache or something.

I hope LJ gets out of their pickle soon - I rather miss all my friends who haven't mirrored/migrated on DW.

Thanks for letting us know what's up!

Yiiiiikes, yet another DDos attack. Haven't they dealt with enough of that by now?

You can bet that the LJ staffers are asking themselves the same question...

denise - 2011-07-27 21:26 (UTC) - Expand

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