Such as today, when 5 minutes became more like 30-40 minutes. This is not the first time it happened, as a frequent participant in this forum. From what I remember, " a quick server maintenance" was never shorter than 15 minutes and was always longer than "should be finished in about x minutes". A minor problem, but isn't there a way to make the estimate more accurate?
The downtime is automated and nearly always runs in less than 3 minites. It's a cron job that starts at 00:45 in the US eastern timezone where the server is located. The webserver logs show that it started on time today (00:45:05) and finished at 00:47:25. I confirmed the length of the downtime by viewing normal forum accesses in the webserver logs. But, members can always check when posts were made by other members to see when the forum was available. The first post after today's downtime was at 12:48am: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/posts/2512533/ And, the same member made a second reply right after that at 12:53 - https://www.wilderssecurity.com/posts/2512535/. Both of those posts were in the same thread you posted in after the downtime So, the forum was definitely closed only for the two and a half minutes shown in the downtime log. I don't know what it is that you experienced, but, the forum wasn't closed for 30-40 minutes. Most likely, if your browser was somehow stuck showing either an error message or our closure note, you probably only needed to do a hard refresh in it. I've seen the same kind of thing myself where the browser showed a totally messed up page, and then a message about the site not being available. But, that was one of those bogus local error screens browsers sometimes use. It was messed up from caching items badly from the webserver restarting. I don't remember if a Ctrl F5 fixed it or if I had to close the browser and reopen.
I have similar experience on this forum - navigating to site that was previously inaccessible doesn't show me the site when it's back online. F5 usually solves the problem. Clearing cache would probably help also.
What browsers for both of you? For me, it was only Chrome that had the problem. Firefox and Opera seemed to handle it.
