01:20 PM PST: Information regarding service interruptions on October 24, 2009
On October 24, 2009, we experienced short service interruptions that were noted here on our system status page. These affected, at different intervals, page-serving and add-to-cart functionality for some visitors to Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Yahoo! Store sites. As a result of this short service interruption, some merchants were also unable to access their Store Manager for a period of time. We would like to take this opportunity to apologize for these interruptions, and to provide you with information on their root cause.
After investigating, we’ve found that these interruptions occurred due to an unexpected power surge and subsequent power outage in one of our data centers. Our primary backup power supply was also affected by this power surge. The secondary backup source took over after a short delay.
Once traffic was routed to an unaffected data center, this issue was resolved. However, as a result of the unexpected power surge, a small number of sites using the database inventory feature continued to experience add-to-cart latency. These issues were isolated to a very small number of servers.
We are continuing to investigate this issue, and are putting measures in place to prevent future occurrences. We would like to reassure you that throughout the year, holiday performance preparation and testing has been and will continue to be a top priority. Along with the ability to route traffic to and serve pages from multiple data centers, as occurred on October 24, we’ve also made significant order and basket server improvements to increase order-handling capacity, and software upgrades to strengthen system performance.
Your business is highly valued, and we sincerely regret any inconvenience this may have caused.
