Durn it. Just when I was about to hit submit with a pic of the gigantic white-billed woodpecker that I spotted from my trip down to Florida last month.
Good thing I still have the… uh oh. I think I might have written over that with my in-flight movie download.
Oh well.
Easy living in denial of that
I am a global moderator for a service that gets hit occasionally by DDOS attacks, which can be extremely frustrating for the members, so I completely understand what iNaturalist is going through right now. Now’s a good time to appreciate all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes and to go out and enjoy nature during the outage.
Thanks for all the hard work and updates- no need to be sorry, this is out of your control! We appreciate you, it’s crazy how much I look forward to using the app… just makes us appreciate you more
Thank you the persons or team working to resolve this issue. Yes, agree that we appreciate iNaturalist now more than ever and the untiring support behind it.
Thanks for all the hard work, and on a weekend, no less. :)
Thank you for all that the staff will be frantically, but methodically (!), doing over the weekend. We can wait, even if we twitch while we do it…
I’m wondering if it would help if we all sent a donation or became supporters of iNaturalist - then it would have more staff to help cover all these kinds of things.
for what it’s worth, it looks like there’s still an opening for a DevOps position at iNat: https://californiaacademyofsciences.applytojob.com/apply/4QCHXPrjTV/INaturalist-DevOpsfocused-Full-Stack-Engineer.
so while money is nice, it might be more important to reach out to your networks to help find folks to fill this position. it seems like some of the folks in this thread do things related to this sort of thing. so maybe they or someone they know might be a good fit.
I’m clueless about the computer things behind this website, though I appreciate that they work. When I told my former computer programmer wife that the indexing was lost and you had to re-index everything, her eyes got wide. Told me it’s a really big job. So I guess this is pretty terrible. Glad you have the week-old backup to start from. Thank you very much for doing all this work.
I’ll try to hold out for another day, but this iNaturalist withdrawal is hard!
The withdrawal is rough! I really hope iNat continues to exist during my lifetime, because if it ever shut down for good I have no idea how I would function.
Same, five times over past 24 hours (i was on uploading things when it went down). I onlu now thought to check the forum for updates xD
Just… a heartfelt thank you for all the sleeplessness you’ve endured and dedication going into rebuilding. 
-another iNatter confronting (and doubling down on) my addiction
Out of curiosity, has there ever been this big of an unexpected outage before? This is the only one that I’ve seen in the last ~2 years to my memory.
Thanks for the support, everyone. Things are actually looking good right now, so we’re hoping to open up shop again later tonight, and if not then probably tomorrow morning. There will almost certainly be some notification weirdness, either missing notifications or getting notified about things you’ve already seen, but getting the site back is the first priority and we can deal with the notifications later.
@Arman, I’m pretty sure this is the longest unexpected downtime we’ve had since Patrick joined the team and got our systems in much better shape than I was ever capable of (never been my strong suit, I’m afraid). While we occasionally struggle with high load for various reasons, this kind of sweeping issue at the data center is new for us and not something we had guarded against. The time to recovery from such events also just gets more daunting the bigger we get, which was kind of the real kicker here
And FWIW, yes, hiring more staff will help a ton with issues like this, but money doesn’t hurt either, particularly reliable monthly donations, even if that’s just $1 a month. That can help us support more staff, or rent more servers, or invest in expanding the infrastructure across multiple data centers.
I’m going through serious withdrawal syndromes now, but I (almost) feel worse for the iNat team. What a high-pressure situation.
Fear not, iNat Team!! We will be here when you have the system up and running again!
And I’m sure there are many users who have the ability to help in some way.
Thank you iNat!!
shout out to all the ancient Microsoft word users who know what this means
Do you think the onslaught of new photo uploads once the site is up and running will cause more issues?
I’ve had the same thought!