Ups & downs & preparing to Party

Every year when summertime kicks in, party's & events start later and draw less people, logins slow down slightly, and less new people enter the grids. It's not that the Metaverse grinds to a halt though, as loads of activities are also available throughout summer.
One of the major events being OSgrids 9th birthday party.  Over 60 creators are building / have built displays on the OSG9B regions surrounding Event Plaza in OSgrid. Make sure to visit, stroll around and feast your eyes on the creative ingenuity of the people dwelling our world.  

Last week OSgrid had an outage, first the logins were disabled, and eventually the grid was taken offline. One of the asset servers was locked, and as a security precaution things were taken offline until the engineer that built the cluster could have a look & fix it. Nothing exploded. 

Now when the grid goes off, this is "uncommon" and always causes some strange panic. When the loginpage sais "Logins disabled" you can be sure maintenance of some form is happening, there patching, or investigating some issue. Typically this doesn't take extremely long.

When the loginpage sais the grid is down, you can (when due) expect a message at twitter in the sidebar on that same page, and a notification on http://news.osgrid.org which will also email you, if subscribed.
Mind this happens only after there is a "formal response", preferably with an ETA on a fix. This generally will happen between 8 and 24 hours, if it's expected to be down longer. Before that time, you can be sure all social media channels & the OSG forums already have something posted, as "bad" news tends to travel fast.

Well than how do they know ?  If you need to know about it every time the grid burps immediately, IRC is the place to be. Within minutes after the logins being disabled you can expect activity there. Possibly even hear a reason for the logins being disabled, or talk to people that know. For rest it's unfortunately the same, you act like all of us. You wait until the green "online" thingy appears back on the webby. Not much more you can do anyways, they don't shut it down for shits & gigglez.
Due to careful attention & monitoring, and acting in best interest of the grid and its residents potential catastrophic events are avoided which should be applauded. And since apparently finding info can be a challenge, if you like to keep up to speed on OSGrid and all things Metaverse related, try this : http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/osgrid  and you have most relevant stuff  & info available in a click.