Residents on our Release Candidate Regions got an extra bonus Region restart today. We apologize if this extra restart disrupted your Second Life fun, so we want to explain what happened.

The Release Candidate channels exist so that we can try new server versions under live conditions to discover problems that our extensive internal testing and trials on the Beta Grid don't uncover. Unfortunately, it's not nearly possible for us to simulate the tremendous variety of content and activities that are found on the main Grid. We appreciate that Region owners are willing to be a part of that process, and regret those occasions when a bug gets past us and disrupts those Regions.

Normally, Region state is saved periodically many times a day as well as when the Region is being shut down for a restart. The most recent Region state is restored when a Region restarts.

The extra roll today was needed because we found a problem that could have caused long-running Regions to fail to save that state.  Without the roll, there would be a significant chance that changes made to those regions might not be there following the regularly scheduled roll because the save data would be out of date. Good news! It’s been fixed, and today's roll applies that fix.  The roll took a little longer than usual because we took extra care to ensure that the Region saves would work normally for this roll.

We apologize for any disruption to your Second Life today, but at least you can rest assured that  Second Life saves!