UPDATE ON MOVIE PURCHASE PROBLEM

[Bound2Burst]

Dreamhost have experienced a problem with their system over the past 36 hours, and some issues have yet to be resolved. Here is a recent message from their CEO Simon.

------------------------------------------
From Simon Anderson, CEO, DreamHost: My sincere apologies for the downtime experienced today by many of our dedicated and VPS customers, plus some shared customers. I know that this has been a poor customer experience for you. Almost all services are back up after an intense effort from the DreamHost dev, admin, data center and support teams. I was involved in the coordination of our efforts today and now am able to share what happened, and what we’re going to do to reduce the risk that it happens again.

We run Debian OS and have used autoupdates to ensure security packages are installed as soon as they are available. We’ve had some breakage in the past from this approach, but nothing major. However last night’s autoupdate went badly wrong, removing essential packages from dedicated, VPS and some shared servers. Our monitoring and support team flagged the issue fast, and we scrambled our admin, dev and NOC teams to reinstall the packages that had been removed by autoupdate, reboot servers, fix package dependencies, and test that individual services were live. Given the number of services affected, this took a long time to complete. Rest assured we had all hands working on the issue, but I know it was still a frustrating experience for customers.

[Bound2Burst]

The purchase problem on Files Forever remains unchanged. Someone is supposed to be investigating, but they are taking their time about it. Sorry for the continued lack of service.