Hi Residents!

A lot of people had trouble connecting to Second Life yesterday (Aug 30th, 2020), and I want to explain a bit about what happened, and why we didn’t post on the Second Life Status page right away.

Early in the morning (US time) yesterday one of the major Internet providers had an issue that impacted a lot of the Internet as a whole, including Second Life. Several other Internet companies have written their own really good blog posts about what happened. We got caught up in the same thing.

The reason we were slow to post on the Second Life Status page is because, from our monitoring systems’ point of view, Second Life itself and all our systems were functioning normally. That means, our operations team wasn’t getting alerted. Of course, from the Resident point of view, Second Life was effectively down in some parts of the world, and that’s really what matters.

To help us react quicker in the future we’ve made a few changes.

Yesterday evening we added a new monitoring service that checks on some of Second Life’s core systems from all around the globe. It’s a service that a lot of other companies use too, so we’ll get alerted better in the future. When Internet-scale events like yesterday happen there’s not a lot we can do about it, but we can post on the status page quicker to let our Residents know we’re aware things aren’t right.

We’re sorry for the lack of communication yesterday. We know how important Second Life is to our Residents, and we’re taking steps to increase our visibility into issues outside of our servers. It’s our hope that these steps will enable us to communicate better with y’all in the future.

See you inworld!

April Linden
Second Life Operations Manager