Crossposting to LJ

[denise]

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!

Comments

[helens78]

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

[marilla_pm67]

Thanks for telling us what happened.

Sam

[blueberry_ash]

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

[cmcmck]

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

[lexicalcrow]

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.

[supergee]

Thanx for explaining.

[niqaeli]

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.

[denise]

*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.)

[alexiel_neesan]

Thanks for letting us know!

[21freckles]

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.

[dynamite_lady]

Ow I didn't realise that - otoh I think I only used the phrase DoS when whinging on a locked G+ entry, so not exactly widespread scaremongering...

[denise]

Oh, no, I don't mean on the "individual people talking to each other" level -- I mean more on the company-communication level. So, like, it would be one thing for me to post "LJ is probably under DDoS" in my personal journal, and another in dw_maintenance, that kind of thing.

Overall, we try to be really careful with things like that -- obviously if LJ is down, it affects us/our users, in that LJ is our most common target for imports and crossposts, but we don't want to be saying things that are inaccurate or that LJ would prefer us not saying. So we're careful to only repeat what they've said through their official channels, no matter what we might know from other channels!

[archangelbeth]

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.

[magid]

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....).

[spikewriter]

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

[majoline]

Thank you for the post!

[fhionnuisce]

Thanks! It was driving me a little nuts.

[falena]

Thanks for keeping us updated. I <3 DW.

[anne_d]

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. :)

[castalusoria]

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!

[originalpuck]

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!

[denise]

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

[alannah_plant]

thanks for explaining what's going on!

[meta1960]

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

[lady_ganesh]

I didn't know that, thanks!