GeoCommons 'longerthanexpected' Downtime

As some of you may have noticed, GeoCommons had an overly extended downtime yesterday. We deploy regular updates to GeoCommons as part of our continued feature improvements to the underlying GeoIQ platform. This update was a very big one, which isn’t quite apparent yet but definitely will become clear in the near future.

In typical perfect storm fashion, in the middle of our update as code was being pushed to our distributed hosts the power went out in most of the Clarendon and Courthouse neighborhoods of our offices. The simple effect was that this included our internet which halted the update mid-deploy. Thankfully, we have awesome engineers who know how to deal with emergent situations and used alternative means to continue the deployment. Always a fun time.

We heard from a lot of community members that have come to rely on GeoCommons as part of their geospatial and collaboration workflows so we apologize if the update interrupted your work, demonstrations, or just fun map making. We’ll make sure and provide better warning in the future for big updates and also schedule different times.