| Title | Technical Problems Plague BBC Online Services - Again | |
| Date | Sunday July 27 2014, @12:45PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
After last weekend's sustained outage at the BBC, a promised explanation has been published. It appears that several concurrent sporting events pushed application load over usual levels. Given that caching and CDNs are used extensively, this shouldn't be an issue. However:
At almost the same time we had a second problem. We use a caching layer in front of most of the products on BBC Online, and one of the pools failed. The products managed by that pool include BBC iPlayer and the BBC homepage, and the failure made all of those products inaccessible. That opened up a major incident at the same time on a second front.
Our first priority was to restore the caching layer. The failure was a complex one (we're still doing the forensics on it), and it has repeated a number of times. It was this failure that resulted in us switching the homepage to its emergency mode ("Due to technical problems, we are displaying a simplified version of the BBC Homepage"). We used the emergency page a number of times during the weekend, eventually leaving it up until we were confident that we had completely stabilised the cache.
Unfortunately, the root cause doesn't appear to have been identified or corrected because video streaming is equally unresponsive this weekend.
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