George Mason Website Outages

March 25, 2020 3:41 p.m.
Outage category: 
Website
Location: 
All locations
Status: 
Open
Resolved alert: 
03/09/2020 1:00 pm

WPEngine hosted websites had been having issues in the preceding weeks in which the websites would respond more slowly than normal while certain administrative operations, such as copying or restoring websites, were in process. On this particular morning, the websites stopped responding completely when a member of our team initiated a new website instantiation.

Initial symptoms: 

Users were unable to load WPEngine-hosted WordPress websites or experienced slow or intermittent access to these websites during this time period.

Duration: 
03/09/2020 10:00 am - 03/09/2020 1:00 pm
Impact to Mason: 

Users were unable to load WPEngine-hosted WordPress websites or experienced slow or intermittent access to these websites during this time period.

Affected Services: 
WordPress Course Blogs
Other Affected Services: 
All Wordpress websites hosted on WPEngine
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Cause: 

The web host had technical issues which resulted in not enough server resources available to support normal website operations.

Resolution: 

Our WPEngine-hosted websites were split into two different accounts so that more resources were available to each environment.

Prevention: 

Same as resolution. We expect that these changes will alleviate this problem. We haven’t experienced similar issues or slowness since this change was made.

STATISTICS
Service Team: 
Web Application Services