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Why The Tyee Blinked Off

A server malfunction threw us off-line for several days. We're back.

David Beers 28 Jul 2004TheTyee.ca

David Beers is the founding editor of The Tyee and serves as current editor-in-chief.

He started the publication in 2003 as an experiment in new ways of doing online journalism in the public interest, including solutions-focused reporting, crowd-funded support and a humane work culture. He loves what The Tyee has become thanks to amazing colleagues and readers.

He has lived in Vancouver since 1991. Before The Tyee he was a senior editor at Mother Jones Magazine and the Vancouver Sun, and his writing has appeared in many U.S. and Canadian outlets. He is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia's graduate school of journalism.

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TheTyee.ca

Welcome back readers of The Tyee. Thanks for your patience since Monday, when we suddenly and unexpectedly went off-line. We've endured, and are still recovering from, a malfunction of our server. No, we weren't hit by a virus or hackers. And yes, we've learned a few lessons about how to safeguard our site in the future so that we don't crash so badly again.

'Perfect storm'

What happened was this: While a technician was loading some new memory into our server some key data files became corrupted, and we've spent the past days trying to recover Tyee contents from them. As it turns out, our back-up system was also not working properly, and so it has taken longer than would normally be the case to get The Tyee's full contents back on-line. All of this made for a "perfect storm" of glitches that has meant an agonizing several days for all the people involved with the The Tyee, and we thank the technicians who are working hard to put everything back in place as soon as possible.

As of Thursday morning, we were still working to make it possible to post comments to stories, and comments to past stories may be missing for a time.

The site being down meant we missed our Monday email mail-out to subscribers. We will be combining this week's abbreviated content with last week's in the upcoming August 2 mail-out.

New search function

A bright note: You can now "google" The Tyee to find past articles. Look for the search function in the left hand sidebar of the index home page, just below the listing of our departments. By the way, you can click on those departments - NEWS, VIEWS, LIFE, etc. -- to find the past 20 stories in any category.

Again, thanks for bearing with us and coming back. It's going to take a lot more than a little crash to keep us from bringing you the feisty, independent news and views you've come to expect.

David Beers is founding editor of The Tyee.  [Tyee]

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