Stale Account Info Due to Caching Error
Starting at 5:50 AM Eastern time, a data caching error caused steemit.com and other applications leveraging Steemit’s HTTP API to display stale account history data. The fact that multiple applications displayed this information lead some users to believe that the issue was with the Steem blockchain, however, that was not the case. At no time was the blockchain affected and therefore at no time were follower counts, posts, or funds at risk.
We are still investigating the exact cause of the original caching error and should have fixes deployed within 24 hours. We have also instituted fixes which ensure that if the bug does appear again it will not result in stale account history being displayed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Team Steemit
Steemit needs a status page that shows if things are up. When it goes wrong people panic. We need something on Twitter or elsewhere we can check for updates.
I'm in full agreement with you. A status page or something offsite where people can go for updates. Both. Discord maybe? A GINAbot alert? Something. I'd rather keep it in the confines of what users are commonly using that doesn't include the social media we're attempting to transition away from, but hey, even that is better than panicking from lack of information.
you could have just signed into
https://steemitstage.com
with your posing key as the steem blockchain was running just fine on there
That's certainly nice to know. I didn't actually have any issue today, though (it's buggy off and on this week, but so far not today). I was just agreeing with @steevc that some kind of universal heads up about what was going on would be nice.
I would agree that a service status page would be good
They indicated in this post that they do not like to give out real-time updates until they know what is going on, as it may provide information to a potential attacker. It seems better for them to make sure everything is safe before they tell the world that there is a problem.
That's fair enough, but letting people know they are aware there are issues helps to quell the panic.
I was thinking of something like this https://status.dropbox.com/
Same thing though. “We are aware of issues” = notifying the world there are issues, which could draw attention to something that would not be good to communicate until the situation is under control.
I think it's obvious there are issues when the site shows old data or nothing at all. As it gets bigger and there's serious money at stake there could be a lot of upset people out there who want reassurance. I don't expect them to announce security vulnerabilities unless they have already dealt with them.
Attackers are not necessarily going to be using the website 24/7, but posting an announcement to a place that is specifically for announcing outages is something that may give an attacker an alert.
I fully understand the seriousness, and the amount of money at stake. If you read that post I shared, they gave their policy on this type of thing. What you (and other users) want to happen in order to feel more safe is actually something that would make you less safe. Given the seriousness of what is at stake, not communicating anything until the situation is under control makes a lot of sense.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense, @timcliff. Thank you for your helpful explanation.
Thanks Terry :)
Cachet is even with this ironic name a very nice opensource project just for this, i am using it myself a longer while.
Thanks for reporting what happened!
I was expecting much longer downtime and was happy to see it recovered quickly.
Too much centralization around these APIs...
Too good to be true. Is this an incident report?
It is a badly done incident report.
And I should know that business.
But it is a step in the right direction:))
Lol I believe it is
Agree with @steevc we must have a separate announcement page or channel.
Well, it's good to hear that from your side! I'm pretty sure a lot of users were a bit concerned (myself included) about this, because nobody knew exactly what's wrong.
When steemit crashing , I was very scared.
But after about 1 hour it was turned on again,
I was very happy and exciting also...
Thanks Steemit team for notice us...
You are pretty fast! The hardest bugs to solve are that which are hard to reproduce, as this one may be, I am afraid. Good luck with it and hope we will hear good news from you guys soon!
Thank you for new update! Waiting for new update soon to be better!
I took it as a sign that I needed to go to bed lol. Left me a little confused that early in the morning why I was only seeing blogs/comments saying they where 12 or more day old and everything more recent being missing.
Thanks you for communicating with the community in regards to this outage.