Thursday was another fast day in the news here in Oslo, with stories breaking about an economic upturn, a threatened ban on all fossil-fueled vehicles in the city, collisions and skyrocketing insurance claims after some bizarre winter weather, and more. But then suddenly everything came to a halt.
In the middle of writing a story about complaints against state broadcaster NRK cutting its regional news coverage, newsinenglish.no froze, and went offline for what was to be several hours.
It’s the worst thing that can happen in the news business, or any business, really. We’ve all come to rely so much on computer systems working, and when they don’t, those running websites and using them are left frustrated and angry.
Messages started coming in quickly from the Norwegian company hosting and running our server: “We’re experiencing reduced output on our Cloud Server-platform in the Oslo area. Our technicians are investigating.” At 3:15pm we were told an error had been localized in an Oslo data center and “we continue to work on the problem.” Finally, after several more hours, came word that some servers were up again, that “hard re-boots” may be necessary and that corrective measures and monitoring would continue.
Newsinenglish.no was far from the only website affected, and the situation was beyond our control, but I want to apologize to our readers for the unusual and aggravating disruption in service. Stories interrupted by the crash will be restored and I’ll be catching up to make sure you’re all caught up on the major news of the day.
Thanks for sticking with us,
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
