On Thursday, May 24th 2018, at around 6:00 a.m. ET, an unexpectedly power failure occurred at the Hetzner data center in Falkenstein, Germany. This caused the Exposure platform to go offline for a period of 28 hours until service resumed on Wednesday, May 25th at around 10 a.m. ET. All stories and platform features became available at that time.
No data was lost during this outage, as Exposure is continuously backed up to a secure location outside of the data center.
This outage was the result of a strong voltage reduction in the local power supply caused by a heavy storm, which caused the data center's main and backup power supplies to fail. Hetzner technicians worked to replace the necessary power supplies and, in time, were able to bring the data center back online.
During this outage, we were continually updating our status at http://status.exposure.co/ and https://twitter.com/exposure. We sent a total of three emails to active members to inform them of the status of the issue.
What steps are we talking to prevent this in the future
It is extremely rare for such a large data center to experience an issue of this degree. We understand the severity of this outage and apologize that we were unable to rectify the issue more quickly. We assure you that we are taking steps to better protect your experience moving forward.
In the coming week you will receive information about a scheduled maintenance period. During this time, we will be moving Exposure to a cloud-based server on Amazon EC2. This move will provide greater redundancy and make rare outages like this one even less likely.
This move will be seamless for you and your stories. There are no updates or action required.
*How we are updating our outage protocol *
Once the server move is complete, our outage protocol will act much faster to bring new servers online in the event of a power failure. Better communication workflows have already been implemented in the event of future outages. Please subscribe to our status page to receive update in real time: http://status.exposure.co/.
*Let us know if you have any questions *
Don’t hesitate to email support@exposure.co with any questions and again we a apologies for the outage.
Luke Beard
CEO & Founder of Exposure