Hi Parse.ly users,

Around 12:16am this morning, Parse.ly’s main database server that powers the Parse.ly news reading interface went down.  Unfortunately, our system administrator is on vacation in Greece at the moment — or, should we say, fortunately for him!

I’ve successfully rolled our backups to the failover Parse.ly database server, however since our last complete backup happened before the start of the weekend, approximately 5% of our total users may be affected by some strange behavior until we can recover the data off the original server that turned off today.

• If you signed up for Parse.ly over the weekend or activated your account over the weekend, you may no longer be able to sign in with your credentials.  If this is the case, feel free to contact us, and we can look into getting you access to your account more quickly.
• If you were using Parse.ly over the weekend, you may notice that some of your star / read states may be out of date.

ALL USERS will notice notice a “gap” in your articles for the weekend days, since any articles our system processed over the weekend haven’t yet been reflected in this restored database.  Tomorrow, we are going to work hard to recover that last bit of data so that these 5% of directly affected users no longer have the strange experience, and so that the rest have no other issues.  But if you notice anything strange that isn’t covered in this blog post, please do contact us to let us know.

Finally, the engineering team here at Parse.ly apologizes for any interruption of service you may have experienced.  We are a young service and though we are careful to ensure our systems are backed up and that we have failover servers available for each of our production servers, we do not yet have automated failovers, aka high availability built into our free web application.  Tonight’s experience is one of our first lessons about how useful it would be to build out this system.  We were fortunate in that today’s outage happened at a relatively off-peak hour, but there is no guarantee this will be the case in the future.  Once our sysadmin is back in the states, we’re going to work on making Parse.ly’s disaster recovery more robust, so that users don’t have to suffer the downtime they did tonight.  Thanks for baring with us!  And we’ll update you on this blog once we’re totally done with the remaining data recovery tasks.

Sorry Parse.ly users, but one of our servers unexpectedly failed on us. As a result, we took Parse.ly down.  We’re working hard now roll our backups over to our failsafe and get Parse.ly back up and running.  We should back to normal in a few hours.  We’ll update this post when we’re all good to go.

Andrew’s a lifetime New Yorker. He grew up in the city and Long Island (and now lives in Astoria, Queens), and has always been a fan of the New York. I’ve been in NYC for the past eight years bouncing between Mnhattan and Brooklyn (I just moved to Ft. Greene this past weekend), and have grown to love the city

Well, this past week we had the opportunity — the privilege — to present Parse.ly (our baby) at NYC Demo Day, an event focused exclusively on New York City, early-stage startups.  You can check out some photos of Andrew and I presenting here.

The event was a blast, as evidenced by Andrew’s inexplicably happy face after it was over (see the photos to see what I mean).  Good luck to all the companies: Renthop, Trendsta, SECWatch, LegalRiver, Sensobi, Localytics, Seatgeek, Postling … and, of course, Parse.ly!