Unfortunately, roughly 2 hours ago, lemm.ee went offline. The cause was our load balancer: it suddenly decided that all of our servers had become unhealthy, despite all health checks responding successfully when I requested them directly. In such cases, the load balancer stops serving all requests, effectively meaning that lemm.ee is unreachable for all users. I am still not sure what exactly caused the issue, but I will try to investigate more over the weekend.
For now, we have partially recovered, and I am continuing to work on remaining issues. Hopefully we will be back to 100% very soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Sorry for the delay in updating the status page - I actually had gone out for lunch just a few minutes before the downtime started, so I didn't even realize anything was up until I was back at my computer about 45 minutes later 💀
Actually, we're using Hetzner's cloud load balancer for lemm.ee. But if this issue repeats in the near future, then I will definitely consider setting up something else.
For now, I just redeployed all of our servers completely, but as I don't know the actual root cause of the issue yet, I'm still investigating to figure out if anything more is needed.
Yeah, but it could have been China, India, Iran, or maybe even North Korea. There are a lot of places that think disrupting the rest of the world will get them somewhere.
I thought the entire lemmy network was down because status.lemm.ee was saying our instance was fine and federation wasn't working with every other instance. lol
Thank goodness! Hopefully discovering these vulnerabilities and protecting them will help keep Lemmy alive when the big dogs come in to sweep us away! (Worst fears)
There are two useful sections on https://status.lemm.ee for this - firstly, there is an automated check for federation with all other instances on the bottom of the page, and everything there being red is a definite sign that something is wrong with lemm.ee itself. Secondly, near the top of that page, I will always write a status message manually when I discover & start work on any issues. This second part can have a bit of a delay, as it requires manual input from myself, but I have updated it every time we had any issues so far.