Scheduled maintenance 19 July

Owing to some of the recent issues we've experienced, we will be doing scheduled maintenance on our server infrastructure over the weekend.

During this time, all services will be unavailable whilst we implement a major update to our data and application infrastructure.

We anticipate the down time to be around 1 hour and will take place at 8:00AM BST on Sunday. For your convenience, some time zones conversions:

Tokyo: 4pm

Moscow: 10am

CEST: 9am

Eastern: 3am

Central: 2am

Pacific: Midnight

We will update live via our Twitter account.

FAQ

Why are you doing this?
In the early days of Gitter, we made some assumptions around usage that have turned out to be incorrect. We are doing a massive restructure of how we store data and the application code surrounding it.

Could you not have rolled this out incrementally?
Yes, it's entirely possible to do that, but we felt this approach has the lowest risk of failure and the benefit will be immediate to all users.

What services will be affected?
All of them. Our core database and application server will be taken down, this will mean web, desktop, mobile, irc and API services will be unavailable.

How long do you expect this to last?
The key element of the process is a data migration script, which we've timed at 5 minutes on a mirror copy of our existing production data. We have a series of tasks to do around this and then finally some intensive testing. If everything goes smoothly we could be done in 30 minutes, so using the sensible approach of doubling any given estimate, we believe we should be done in an hour.

How can we help?
Why thank you for asking. Moral support is always appreciated, although we will probably not respond to anything on Twitter whilst we are focused on the task at hand. We will bring next up first and will Tweet if we need a hand giving it a little test.