iNaturalist will be offline for 6-7 hours beginning at 7 pm Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8) on Thursday, February 4. Click here to see this translated into your time zone. During this time, you will not be able to post observations from the mobile apps or interact with the website or API in any way. The iNatForum will still be active.
For many of you, this will coincide with the middle of the night. For others, we acknowledge this may be an inconvenience, so we want to warn you so you can make other plans during that time.
Every few months or so, we need to temporarily take iNaturalist offline in order to update the infrastructure to better accommodate the growing community. Typically, it takes less than 3 hours. This time will be longer because we’re migrating databases and there’s a lot of data to export, migrate, and re-import into the new database.
For those who may be wondering, this is unrelated to the unexpected downtime on Thursday, January 28. This extended downtime was already planned, and the unexpected downtime had no impact on this timing. Thanks for bearing with us.
No, if all goes well, nothing will look different. Bugs are fixed on a regular basis without downtime, so please file a bug report for anything you noticed that doesn’t already have one.