Update2: Just heard from the Soapblox folks, and I'll make the meat of what they told me an update to this diary and the one that followed.
This outage was not at all due to any fault of Soapblox. It was due to a storm that brought down our data center on the East Coast of the US (http://www.pcworld.com/...).
We learned of the outage at about midnight on Friday night and had two full-time folks working with Amazon support, virtually round the clock until early this morning to bring it back up.
In fact, it quite fortunate for our bloggers that there is an established support system to respond to hosting emergencies like this. The lack of such a system is what motivated me to first reach out to offer support services to the original owners of Soapblox three years ago to offer professional hosting and software support services, and what motivated me to direct Warecorp to purchase the network outright last year
We have recently made significant investments in bringing together this important national network of bloggers by appointing Tina Dupuy as EIC at Netroots this year. http://eon.businesswire.com/....
I assure you, we will continue to invest to create a unique, fact-centered community of observation and commentary, news, and video.
Update:
might this have something to do with it? (h/t: DRo)
As I write this, the dominant Democratic blog in my state, of which I am proud to call myself a founder, Green Mountain Daily, is down.
Calitics is down.
Blue Hampshire is down.
Motley Moose is down.
Docudharma is down.
My Left Wing is down.
Texas Kaos is down.
Squarestate is down.
Blue Virginia is down.
Checking Blue Mass Group, which I haven't visited for a while, they're up and running.....but they're no longer a SoapBlox.
Wonder why?
Is it possible they got tired of these all-too-frequent outages?
All these blogs are currently down. This outage, apparently network-wide, was first brought to my attention at 11:30 last night.
This is an election year, in case SoapBlox IT support didn't get the memo. We can't be having these blogs go down like this for these extended periods, and this happens FAR TOO FREQUENTLY.
Soapblox.net is up and work from state blogs is viewable there, but the communities aren't there.
This is NOT COOL.
Get your shit together, SoapBlox.
PLEASE.
(Proviso: If it turns out they've been hacked, I will, of course, update this, but like I said, this has happened before.)