Massive Problems Continue to Plague Grid

For the third straight day, massive problems continued to interrupt services across the grid and disrupt or immobilize residents' use of Second Life. By 20:39SLT on Saturday, when Linden Lab made its first formal announcement on the SL blog that widespread problems were being experienced, residents had already been suffering through disabled TelePortation and limited Search functionality for several hours.In its initial statement, Linden Lab said that "We’re experiencing gridwide slowdowns or failures of multiple services, including mapping, teleporting, search, and asset operations. Operations has moved quickly to resolve the issue, and we expect resolution very shortly." Residents were advised to avoid in-world transactions and all copy operations until further notice. By 23:49, a resolution was announced and Linden Lab declared the issues resolved recommending that residents relog onto the grid.By 01:40SLT on Sunday morning it was already apparent that the declaration that the issues were fixed had been premature and Linden Lab announced that it had disabled Places and Group searches as they continued to try to identify and resolve the problems. Other features continued to function intermittently and unreliably, including TP, Maps, Friends Lists and L$ account balances. By 15:13SLT, some 18 hours after the initial announcement, Frontier Linden reported via the blog that progress was being made and service restoration was expected soon. A fix was announced at 17:00SLT Sunday.Many frustrated residents immediately noted that despite the announced re-enabling of all Search features they were still unable to search for Places or Groups. More aggravating yet, the previous issues with multiple grid functions re-appeared with a vengeance leaving residents stranded and unable to TelepPort, Search, open the Map or rez some inventory items. At 20:26 Linden Lab posted essentially the same announcement as they had made almost exactly 24 hours earlier stating that "We are experiencing gridwide issues at the moment. Residents may experience slowdowns or failures of search, mapping, teleporting and asset operations. Inworld L$ balances may show as Loading… Ops is working to resolve these issues as quickly as possible, in the meantime please avoid making any inworld transactions or operations on no-copy assets."At 00:11SLT Monday the status was updated to include the following: "Reports of issues with other features such as llDialog have been confirmed. No additional information is available at this time. We would like to thank you once again for your continued patience."Rumors flew as residents speculated as to the cause of the massive failures. Blame was hung on everything from a botched rolling restart earlier in the week, to a software attack and hacking incident involving Linden Lab servers, to testing of the new "upgrade" to voice. As is their habit, Linden Lab offered few updates and no response to residents' speculations.As of 09:45SLT Monday morning the problems had been unresolved for more than 49 hours and Linden Lab had not as yet provided an explanation or any estimate of when the issues might be resolved other than "Our Ops team is still working diligently towards a resolution. We will be sure to keep you posted on our progress."Do be sure to do that, Linden Lab.

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