Saturday, June 29, 2013

Live Chat outage [RESOLVED]

The Live Chat system that we use is having a system-wide outage. They are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Details and updates as we have them will be posted here.

12:54pm PT The issues appear to have been resolved, and the Live Chat system is once again humming along.

And if the Live Chat system looks a little different than the one we've used for years, that's because it is! The goal was to find an off-server service that would integrate nicely with our website, yet not be a resource hog like the previous system was.

We wanted an off-site/off-server solution (hosted elsewhere) so that in the extremely unlikely event of an issue on our server customers could still contact us. Unfortunately the downside of that is that we are unreachable if their server goes down.

An additional benefit of having an off-site Live Chat is that we can be contacted if a user accidentally gets themselves blocked by the firewall.

1:24pm PT I spoke too soon, but the issue is expected to be resolved (for reals this time!) shortly.