Our recent downtime

We’re back! Thank you for your patience during our unexpected downtime after our scheduled maintenance.

Original blog post:

As most of you already know, we are currently experiencing our longest downtime ever since we started almost 10 years ago. First of all, we are truly sorry that we have failed to restore access to the site by now. We have also failed to keep you updated along the way.

A planned server update went awry, and the site stopped working as a result. Fortunately we have not lost any data, yet. For more technical explanations, read below.

When will I be able to access the site again?

The site itself is running now, but we have decided to keep it in the lockdown state it’s in right now until we are 100% certain that everything is as it should be.

We might not get there until as late as Friday (2023-10-06, Central European Summer Time).

Again, we are terribly sorry about this, but we are doing this to prevent it from getting worse. Right now we are in a state where we have control, and we want to keep it like that.

However, we have enabled access for the Cachetur.no App. Meaning that if you have a valid API authorization, you may now use the Cachetur.no App.

What happened, and why? (the technical details)

We have postponed necessary server updates for a very long time. Way too long. We have given priority to keeping the site running, and honestly haven’t had the time (please keep in mind that we still operate without a single employee).

That started to become a security risk, too high to tolerate. Therefore a operating system upgrade process was started on Monday. That process unfortunately failed halfway, leaving the entire server in a state where basically nothing worked.

We have hired a specialist to help us fix this. And currently we have all of the server applications back up and running. The cachetur site is operational. However, the underlying operating system is still halfway between the old and the new, and we fear that a reboot might break everything. We are waiting for the specialist to come back to us, possibly Wednesday or Thursday, before we attempt the final fix and a reboot. If everything goes as planned, that’s it. If not, we’ll have to handle it then.

We have backups, but having to restore them if something happens after 1-2 days with new activity, will result in users losing everything they do from the last point until then (or to be accurate, everything done after Monday). That’s why we think it might not be worth the risk in the long run.