Downtime Update Fri 30th Oct

[Simey]

Hi Everyone,

We just wanted to give an update before the weekend. As everyone is probably aware, there is an issue with game ticking at the moment. The high load created by the ticking process, or perhaps by the surge in site visits to go along with a tick, currently cause the server to hang severely, making it unreachable until we manually restart it.
As a result we have paused gameplay.

We've spent the last few days trying to identify what the issue is, but still haven't managed to pin it down. However, we have eliminated a lot of possible causes.

We'll be working over the weekend to try to resolve this. As soon as we have it fixed we'll post here again. To keep game months in sync, we will arrange things so that the next tick happens at 2pm GMT the day after we complete the fix. Hopefully that will also be enough notice for everyone.

Sorry we don't have any better news yet, but we wanted to keep you informed. We'll post another update as soon as we have any new information.

Thanks for your patience.
Sean & Brian

[sean]

Hi again,

We've identified the issue that was causing server lock-ups under high load. We're going to deploy a fix for it tomorrow (Sunday), meaning that ticking can be expected to resume on Monday at 2pm GMT.

We'll update again tomorrow to let everyone know how we get on with the fix, and to confirm when ticking will resume.

Thanks for your patience.
Sean & Brian.

[Brian_]

Hi All,

We found the problem with ticking yesterday. We made the relevant changes and deployed them to the production server today. Ticking will resume at 2pm GMT tomorrow (Monday).

Thanks again for your patience,
Brian & Sean