The outage issues that were plaguing the website — and its IRC channels, including (unfortunately) the official Shroud of the Avatar chat channel — have been resolved for the most part. There are still a few things that I’m going to have to keep an eye on in the days to come, to be sure that the problem(s) don’t re-occur, but I think I’ve mostly got everything licked.

I don’t want to get too much into the heavy technical details of the problem, since it concerns some of the sensitive back-end functionality of the site. Basically, some database tables got filled up way, got into a broken state as a result, and ultimately began causing thousands upon thousands of errors. Add to this some plugin-related issues which just happened to crop up at the same time, and it made for a perfect storm that took the site down in a matter of hours, and then slowed it to a crawl as I tried to restore it.

So anyway…things are up and running again. Enjoy!