Phasor Burn

MobileMe: Important information regarding email service interruption
Last Modified: July 22, 2008
Article: TS1953
Symptoms
Updated: July 22, 2008, 4 p.m. PDT.

On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.

Products Affected
MobileMe Mail
Resolution
We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service.

Hmm, interesting. The troubled MobileMe rebranding and relaunch of the venerable dotMac service has yet another outage of sorts.

Reading the notice it appears they are using data sharding or otherwise splitting users between servers. Curious.

This is as opposed to having a bunch of front end servers, a middle tier of app servers, and a back end of storage. Any server in any tier can be asked to perform a task for any customer (load balanced of course).

Losing a server in that config wouldn’t cause a number of customers to be completely up shit creek. Worst case, everyone slows down a bit.

Then again, once you get beyond a certain size there is little you can do aside from splitting customers into groups and assigning them to nodes (or clusters) that service just those groups. Perhaps there was a catastrophic failure in a multi-multi-TB array at the heart of a cluster.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under General, Rant, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.