Only reasons to for seeing total downtime (as opposed to momentary "is it down for everybody or just me?" type short-term blips) for websites running at enterprise scale is because of a major national disaster or because somebody fucked up in designing the system.
It's weird, I am really bent out of shape about this. Like, I get how it could have happened, I can totally see it. What I don't get is how people who run the world's largest library could think that this is at all an appropriate way to treat your visitors and your citizens when there are so many ways to deal with this technologically. I can't remember in recent memory a website being down for days when it was undergoing a *DoS* attack, much less for routine planned maintenance.
It just makes me so sad. In many ways the libraries of America are responsible for the last fifth of the country who have little to no access to the internet and when we act like "computers are hard" and that our convenience is more important than the user experience of our patrons, I just feel like we don't deserve our good reputation sometimes.
Still fervently hoping it's someone's way of proving some point that will result in better things for the LoC in the future (sort of like how Seattle Public would shut down its webserver when the employees went on furlough) but DAMN.
As an internet professional i'm comfortable saying that there's no excuse to have a website offline like this for 3 days. The government can afford a mirror server, FFS.
It just makes me so sad. In many ways the libraries of America are responsible for the last fifth of the country who have little to no access to the internet and when we act like "computers are hard" and that our convenience is more important than the user experience of our patrons, I just feel like we don't deserve our good reputation sometimes.
Still fervently hoping it's someone's way of proving some point that will result in better things for the LoC in the future (sort of like how Seattle Public would shut down its webserver when the employees went on furlough) but DAMN.