Merchant credit card processor outage

Our payment gateway which processes our credit card transactions, Authorize.net, is currently experiencing an outage:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/03/authorizenet-goes-under-e-commerce-vendors-left-hanging/

Please let us know if your account is close to expiring, so that we may provide you with a free extension to make sure you don’t experience any loss of service.

We’ll post an update as soon they’re back up. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

Update on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 01:26PM by A. Casalena

Our payment gateway began processing transactions again at approximately 18:05GMT.

Thanks for your patience.

Scheduled Maintenance: Sunday, March 29th, 12:00 AM - 3:00 AM EDT

As part of our ongoing efforts to increase capacity and reliability to our service, we will be making changes to our core networking equipment on Sunday, March 29th beginning at 12AM and ending at 3AM.

Squarespace will be offline for short periods of time during this maintenance window, but it is unlikely that the service outage will extend through the entire time frame, probably lasting only a few minutes.

Thanks for your patience!

Update on Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 12:30AM by A. Casalena

Completed! Total actual downtime was 20 minutes. Thanks for your patience!

Internet Explorer 8 Release / Squarespace

As you may or may not have heard, Internet Explorer 8 has been released from Microsoft into the wild. As of today, Squarespace is fully compatible with IE8, and we recommend everyone using previous versions of IE upgrade immediately. From our initial testing, IE8 seems to be a major speed improvement over IE7 and has some great debugging tools that will help us ensure IE works better than ever.

That said, Squarespace still recommends Safari and Firefox as our best performing browsers, followed closely by Google’s Chrome (which is built on the same rendering engine as Safari). If you’ve been in Internet Explorer all these years and have a spare moment, take a moment and give one of these a download — you may just be surprised at how responsive the web can be.

Service Interruption: Monday, March 23rd, 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM EDT

Spoke a little too soon about the maintenance window from earlier tonight. At around 7:00 AM EST, we experienced an internal router failure which brought us down for about an hour. During the maintenance from 1-3AM, we were working on expanding our switching infrastructure, so this was directly related to that maintenance window.

So, in effect, instead of being down from 1-3AM EST, we were instead down from 7-8AM EST. We’ll be scheduling another window shortly to ensure this infrastructure is reliable and further revising things in the future.

Scheduled Maintenance: Monday, March 23rd, 1:00 AM - 3:00 AM EDT

Squarespace will be offline for a short period of time on Monday, March 23th between 1:00AM EDT and 3:00AM EDT as we make changes to our core networking equipment. This probably won’t last more than a few minutes, but we’re allocating some extra time to be certain that there are no issues.

Thanks!

Update on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 03:10AM by A. Casalena

This maintenance has been completed without any service interruption at all.

Squarespace 5.1 Release Notes

Mostly behind the scenes update this evening to prep us for a number of really exciting future changes.  Immediately available:

• Ability to save social credentials in dashboard.  Social links module added.
• New manage posts interface.
• Many UI enhancements across the system, better mode icons + more mode state indicated via editing strips
• New manage comments interface.
• Editor interface improvements.
• Updates to member accounts page to allow searching by login.
• Keyboard control improvements (dialog tabbing, esc+mode changes).
• Bookmarklet support for posting to Journals.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling forward the majority of what this release will be providing.

Also note, if you’re seeing odd display in any areas of the system — you very likely have V5.0 code cached that needs to be cleared.  See this guide for clearing your cache:

http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/2008/7/18/clearing-your-cache-for-v5.html

Scheduled Maintenance: Thursday, February 12th, 1:00AM - 2:00 AM EST

(Note: Moved from original date)

Squarespace will be unavailable this coming Thursday, February 12th, 1:00AM - 2:00 AM EST while we perform maintenance in preparation for our next software releases. We anticipate this downtime will last no more than 5 minutes, but have blocked off the hour just to be safe.

Thanks!

Scheduled Maintenance: Monday, January 5th, 1:00AM - 3:00 AM EST

Squarespace will be offline for a short period of time on Monday, January 5th between 1:00AM EST and 3:00AM EST as we upgrade core networking equipment. This will likely last only a few minutes, but we’re giving ourselves some extra time to verify that there are no issues.

Thanks for your patience.

New WYSIWYG Editor Release

After a successful beta period that helped us polish off the new WYSIWYG Editor, we will begin rolling it out over the next few days.  We will start with a subset of users and slowly ramp up until everyone has it, making sure there are no problems along the way.  The new editor can be identified by a completely new toolbar layout with additional buttons.  Please clear your browser cache to get the new editor.

The new editor is based on proven core technology, TinyMCE, that is widely used across the Internet.  It is the most stable and feature rich core available having been developed over the course of the last 5 years.  It has allowed us to provide more features and fixes for some common problems that have been reported about the current editor.  These include:

• Undo / Redo
• Spellcheck
• Word Count
• HTML Source Quickview
• Full Justify
• Indent / Outdent
• Microsoft Word / Web Content Paste
• Stability / Cross Browser Improvements
• Numerous Bug Fixes

Update (10/22): The new editor has been released to all users.

Peer1 Power Incident Friday, October 10th at 7:30AM

(Anyone writing in to support got an immediate response on this, but we were waiting for a complete explanation before posting.)

For a period of one hour on Friday, October 10th at 7:30 AM, Squarespace sites were unavailable due to a UPS power outage at Peer1 in New York City, which is our network provider. While Squarespace itself implements proper power planning to ensure that most of our core systems are spread between two power sources, the outage affected Peer1’s core networking equipment which routes data to their entire New York datacenter. When the UPS failed, taking the routing equipment with it, all websites at the datacenter (including Squarespace) were taken offline. The outage lasted one hour.

Upon restoration of power and bringing their network equipment online at 8:30 AM — Squarespace immediately began serving traffic again and all was returned to normal. Squarepsace was alerted to the situation by our external monitors within 60 seconds of the incident, and we were on site while Peer1 restored their equipment.

If anyone has any questions about planning, backup, or redundancy — please write in to support to have them answered. We take this sort of thing extremely seriously, and attempt to provide total transparency regarding the systems you’re hosted on and how things here operate.