The Instapaper service experienced an extended outage between Wednesday, February 9 at 12:30PM PT through Thursday, February 10 at 7:30pm PT. We brought the Instapaper service back up with limited access to archives as a short-term solution while we worked to restore the service completely. Today, February 14, we completed the full recovery of the service.
The critical system that failed was our MySQL database, which we run as a hosted solution on Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). Here we’ll cover what went wrong, how we resolved the issue and what we’re doing to improve reliability moving forward.
Excellent analysis. I was impacted by this outage and indirectly, you all were as well. I read for over an hour a day at the very least exclusively in Instapaper and I don’t keep a backlog beyond one week of things to read. Posting what I read here is obviously batched. I write to this blog’s Linked section monthly but I find content to share daily.
I couldn’t send anything to Instapaper for a few days. It was a bummer but this blog highlights how important it is for even small companies to manage databases properly.