Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account.
The twitter from May 20:
I’m sure there is a perfect song to be a metaphor for this situation, but I can’t search for it with Last.fm down
You’ll be able to search for music based on misc. information and pull all songs that relate to it in http://www.jamwee.com’s search feature. Users can tag songs with misc. info and build our database in real time.
http://twitpic.com/6d6hz
Brandon,
jamwee.com
thanks for the plus
Any idea who is hosting their servers ?
Seems like they have their own data centre otherwise they might have blamed service providers aka Amazon Web Services, RackSpace or someone…
obviously twitter
3.4 years is nothing. For comodity hardware Netware was always the best, There are Netware servers out there that have had zero downtime since the 80’s.
Level3 at 6 Braham Street in London.
the RIAA?
u sure? or is he talking about the datacenter location?
Or was that a joke?
Nice!
Scotland RIAA!
They say on twitter their datacenters are based out of London. aws and rack have a dc in london?
It would have been nice to have an alternative to this melt down.
Hope I get a beta invite for this new music site http://www.jamwee.com
The irony is that they bragged about server uptime 10 days ago. http://twitter....atus/1861443555
Actually!
It would have been nice to have an alternative to this melt down.
Hope I get a beta invite for this new music site http://www.jamwee.com
Stop spamming your crappy little not-yet-launched service, please. At least, until you can demonstrate that one of your servers has been up for 1254 days before its power supply melted on the hottest day of the year.
I don’t think that the hosting provider is going to be public. Any way it’s been over 3 years of non stop service.
It was friggin hot in London today. My guess is they host in the Docklands like everybody else here and this does sound like a possibility.
No need to play Sun journalist by adding “they claim” and “maybe” statements nobody can prove right or wrong.
I’ve found it’s best to be careful when it comes to last.fm and the truthfulness of their public statements.
Typically UK weather is a dull winter followed by a dull summer with a smorgasbord or rain, hail and sleet thrown in for good luck.
Turns out we got neither this year, despite global warming, and its ruining most things (in winter everything ground to a halt and now everything we’ll get over heating.
“maybe” that explains the RIAA joke above…
you should also be mindful of libel laws in the UK, they are unfortunately much more stringent than here :\
That’s wonderful but you forgot to specify what time zone your in.
It went offline at 2:13pm central time.
How do you know that server was affected? It might be still up and running.
i’m not even sure where central time is.
Are you drunk Mike?
Central Time is the Time that Satan uses. He lives in the hot core, the centre of the Earth.
Mike is not drunk!
Hey mike there is something fishy … Any server would have a load average and in this case it is Load average 0.00 0.00 0.00 , that means the server was not used at all for a long time! So maybe it is good that you are careful with last.fm statements! Man they were wasting electricity for so many days by keeping a server running that was not doing anything! Maybe I could be wrong…
Read the third comment here:
http://m.flickr...tfm/3548618495/
Check out the graph in on their flickr: http://www.flic...zzd/3582987248/
any idea why the constant temerature gap between all the lines?
Because they have five cooling units. The servers closest to cooling units will be the coolest, in theory.
Also could make a difference if they’re organized vertically, since heat travels up.
Hot air travels up, right? Anyways, what you say seems very plausible to me!
4 rows of racks, 2 hot aisles, 2 cold aisles
Was going to do a story about this on http://www.rev2.org, man you are fast! Before I formulated my thoughts you had the post up!
Agree with Craig. You are fast! I was wandering why I could not get onto last.fm, even checked my BB connection… the next step was to see if TC had reported it. Nope. Not until a few minutes later anyway. The true hub of Tech…
i have a special place in my heart for last.fm
You guys need to do a follow-up on the last story about Last.fm (RIAA-gate). I’m still leaning towards TechCrunch’s version of events being true, though I am a bit perturbed that you guys seemed to delete a lot of comments. I know the Last.fm crowd can be fanatical and out of line, but it seems like some of the comments were reasonable. In any case, though, didn’t you guys say a followup was forthcoming?
Isn’t there something in the Bible about Pride being a sin. I guess the gods are teaching them their lesson. (and that’s why I use Pandora.)
In their defense, I don’t think the tweet was bragging about the uptime of the whole last.fm *service*. It’s saying that a specific *server* has been up for 1244 days, which is indeed a large number. But this server is one of many, of course — it might not even be in their production serving environment (it might be a development server, for example) and indeed last.fm’s downtime doesn’t imply that this server crashed.
Correct!
Back (be gentle), you can all go home now.
The one good thing about this has been how open Last.fm has been to letting us know what happened, even providing a graph for our viewing pleasure. Nothing even close compared to what Twitter says when they’re down. Either way, was missing Last.fm this afternoon!
Hah. It’s called “karma.”
To the peeps (the real ones, not the spammers) saying they wish they had an alternative for when last.fm goes down, I switched to ilike.com, after TC’s last article about CBS Interactive’s love affair with the RIAA. Basically the same type of service (logging the music you listen to.) There’s also stumbleaudio.com, which is directly intended to give you “new” music to listen to.
I look forward to TC getting a karmic kick for unsubstantiated reporting
Go fix your servers and give free radio back!
I hope they are serious about the 3.4 years.
Not to poo poo uptime, but any decent systems administrator will tell you that having a server up for that long isn’t a good thing, really. If anything it means that it hasn’t been properly kept up-to-date with security patches, kernel vulnerabilities, etc. Hopefully, it’s something behind their DMZ.
That being said, they’re handing this outage like pros. Keeping everyone looped in and being transparent. Kudos.
Widen your horizons joe, not everyone is running on Linux crap.
Time to patch.
Hey, it happens. Cut them some slack.
I don’t think that the hosting provider is going to be public. Any way it’s been over 3 years of non stop service.
I know the Last.fm crowd can be fanatical and out of line, but it seems like some of the comments were reasonable.