Service Interruption: Saturday, November 21st, 7:30 AM - 8:45 AM EST

This morning at around 7:30 AM EST Peer1 (our data center) had a power incident which removed power to a number of our cabinets. Squarespace sites were unavailable for about an hour while both power and services were restored.

We normally protect against this type of incident by setting up servers with multiple power sources and spreading important parts of our infrastructure across different locations, but were unable to prevent downtime from a power outage of this type.

We’re constantly looking at our infrastructure to improve performance and prevent downtime and will look at how we can avoid protect ourselves from these power incidents in the future.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23TH, 1:00 AM - 3:00 AM EST

Squarespace will be unavailable for a short period this coming Monday, November 23th, 1:00AM - 3:00 AM EST while we perform maintenance. We anticipate this work will take no more than a few minutes, but have blocked off the extra time to allow for adequate testing.

Thanks!

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11TH, 6:30 AM - 8:00 AM EDT [CANCELLED]

Squarespace will be unavailable for a short period this coming Sunday, October 11th, 6:30AM - 8:00 AM EDT while we perform database maintenance. We anticipate this work will take no more than a few minutes, but have blocked off the extra time to allow for adequate testing.

Thanks!

Update on Friday, October 9, 2009 at 10:50AM by A. Casalena

This work is being postponed indefinitely. We’ll post another update when the work is ready to be scheduled.

Scheduled Maintenance: Sunday, July 26th, 12:00AM - 1:00 AM EDT

Squarespace will be unavailable this coming Sunday, July 26th, 12:00AM - 1:00 AM EDT 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!

Update on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 11:35PM by A. Casalena

Maintenance was completed successfully. Total downtime was approximately 8 minutes.

Thanks for your patience!

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: SUNDAY, JULY 19TH, 5:30 AM - 8:00 AM EDT

We’ll be making more upgrades to our core networking equipment on Sunday, July 19th beginning at 5:30AM and ending at 8:00AM EDT.

Squarespace will be unavailable for a very short period of time during this maintenance window. We anticipate downtime to last no more than a few minutes.

Thanks!

Update on Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 07:03AM by A. Casalena

Maintenance has been completed.

Squarespace was up and down for short periods during the maintenance period.

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: SUNDAY, JULY 12TH, 5:30 AM - 8:00 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, July 12th beginning at 5:30AM and ending at 8:00AM EDT.

Squarespace will be unavailable for a very short period of time during this maintenance window. We anticipate downtime to last no more than a few minutes.

Thanks!

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.