Today's Website & Forum Outage

Our website and forums were offline for approximately 8 hours this afternoon and evening due to the failure of a crucial piece of network equipment at our ISP's datacenter. As you can now tell, the website and forums are back online. This outage was not a result of any scheduled or unplanned maintenance on the part of BVA and was enitrely out of our control. Nevertheless, I apologize for the inconvenience of not having the website and forums accessible today and am glad that it did not affect our 20+ pilot session this evening.

Our ISP has described the problem to me as a a power failure that occurred despite multiple layers of redundancy (building wide battery UPS, and multiple redundant diesel generator backup systems). The problem has been diagnosed as a failed automated transfer switch (ATS), a key component in power redundancy and failure. Once power is restored, the ISP will be reviewing the failure of its power redundancy systems to ensure corrective action is taken to address the problem.

I will certainly post any additional relevant information I come across.

I should also thank our dedicated Social Media team, including Tom (tofutwitch11) and Brandon (bcarter755), who dutifully kept us up-to-date through our Facebook profile (http://www.facebook.com/BVATC) and Twitter page (http://twitter.com/#!/BVATC). Those of you following us on social media were kept updated throughout the course of the day. And those of you who weren't...shame! You'll know better next time, I'm sure.