A bit of information regarding the site outage that affected Flightglobal on Friday - Saturday last week.
An incident hit our central systems around 3.40pm GMT on Friday and took much of Reed Business Information's IT infrastructure down (RBI is the publishing house for Flightglobal). Even our email was down and we were forced to resort to Tweeting messages regarding the problems in order to communicate with the Flightglobal community.
The Infrastructure team worked through Friday night into Saturday morning to get everything back up, and the site returned to normal at around 10am GMT on Saturday. Which is pretty good going considering how many websites, networks and systems they had to get back up and running.
We do have redundancy in the system designed to keep the main parts of the site up during an incident such as this but such was the severity of the problems that those rerouting processes themselves were affected.
You can see the impact the outage had on Flightglobal from the traffic graph below (hourly page views), with traffic virtually drying up instantly, and not coming back properly till Saturday morning.
The good news is that this is about as bad a scenario as you can image for a website publisher, but we recovered pretty rapidly and have learnt many lessons from what up until now had been a theoretical situation.
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