Anyone else receive this greeting earlier today when trying to get on the forums?   I had someome else try to get on from Florida and they got the same screen I did.  At least I know it's not just me.

Leosun:

 

Yes, I received that same message this morning.

It was down for quite a while and I don't think anyone at astronomy.com was aware of it.  I think we can thank Michael Bakich for getting someone on it to get it back on line for us.  

There apparently was some kind of outage at the service provider. I called them this morning and left voicemail, and notified various Kalmbach people via their Facebook messaging and emails, but I'm not sure if those went through because of the problem.

My email to the support people bounced back, so I'm fairly sure the power was out and the servers were down.

I've been out for awhile and just returned to find a message from Matt Quandt to the effect that he had notified the right folks. The message from Matt had a 1:53 pm time stamp on it.

I didn't notice the problem until around 9 a.m.

chipdatajeffB:

There apparently was some kind of outage at the service provider. I called them this morning and left voicemail, and notified various Kalmbach people via their Facebook messaging and emails, but I'm not sure if those went through because of the problem.

My email to the support people bounced back, so I'm fairly sure the power was out and the servers were down.

I've been out for awhile and just returned to find a message from Matt Quandt to the effect that he had notified the right folks. The message from Matt had a 1:53 pm time stamp on it.

I didn't notice the problem until around 9 a.m.

I sent an email to Karri and even though I never received a reply from her it apparently went through. It didn't get kicked back like it would normally if it had failed.    I did eventually chat with Michael while on facebook and he didn't seem to be aware of the problem at that time.  He checked to see if he could access his email which he could.  My guess is the email server is completely separate from the web site server because the site was still inaccessible at that time.  That was at around 2:00 PM EST.   I was finally able to get back on somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00 PM EST.

Wonder what the cause was?

I just now saw your message on FB ... sorry i wasn't online when you sent it, Tim!

I kinda chased service around from 9-ish to almost 10 a.m. and never actually talked with anyone, so I gave up and went about my own business today. When I got home just after 4 I found emails from Matt and Dave Eicher, and by that time everything was sorted out.

They had truckloads of snow up there yesterday, so I figured it was weather-related power outages. But it might well have been some other problem. The hosting company operates a LOT of other servers and apparently they had massive trouble there today because my emails to their customer support center bounced as "server not online" ...

Karri Ferron:

Sorry I didn't get your e-mails earlier guys ... I wasn't by the computer and my phone was on silent while doing some volunteering. Everything is getting back in order, though.

Hope it was nothing serious. 

 Coincided with an unexplained Trojan/Virus that slipped by McAfee.

 It was almost splitting atoms getting rid of it!