We were unavailable for about 15 minutes due to a large scale DDoS attack that hit Hurricane Electric who is one of our transit providers (our provider’s provider).  They null routed the attack as soon as they were made aware of it. At this point all connectivity has been restored.  We will continue to monitor the situation.

We will be performing 2 read-only tests against our New York data center this afternoon starting shortly after 8:30 PM UTC.   First meta.stackoverflow.com and then stackoverflow.com will appear briefly in read-only mode while we load-test our New York servers.  After the test the sites will return to their normal functionality.

Our primary SQL Server experienced a “non yielding scheduler” and wrote a 234 GB memory dump to disk before restarting.  During this time all sites were offline.  After the crash dump completed SQL was able to start without issue.  We will continue to monitor the server and have plans to switch all of our sites back over to NY this weekend which are running on fully patched SQL…

Weather permitting, we will be moving most Stack Exchange operations to our new New York data center facility on Saturday Feb 9th, 2013. A high level overview (a.k.a. “THE PLAN”) of what will happen on Friday night and Saturday: 02:00 UTC Saturday Restoring the latest full backups from Oregon (OR) 15:00 UTC Saturday We’ll do a go/no-go check with Internap (our colo) in New …