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On Sunday, May 9, at 10:53am, the primary OCLC data center in Dublin lost power during required internal facilities maintenance activity. It effected ALL OCLC services including QuestionPoint. OCLC staff worked diligently to restore services as quickly as possible. All systems are fully recovered and operational, and QuestionPoint came back online at approximately 4:28 PM EDT.

From OCLC:

During the outage, no "out of service" message was able to display, and patrons trying to access QuestionPoint via email/webform or chat webform would have received an autmatic error message (such as a "404" error). No question could actually have been correctly submitted, and no message assuring the patron that their question had been submitted would have displayed.

Libraries using the hosted chat forms would have had a similar error message display, when the link to chat was clicked. Qwidgets would not have appeared at all on library webpages. Patrons using libraries with self-hosted chat forms would not have had any connection once they clicked the submit button. While no questions have been "lost", since they couldn't be submitted, we do regret that patrons were not able to access the service.

OCLC schedules maintenance activities at typically low usage times. We regret any interruption of service, and apologize for any inconvenience to our users. We are confident that we have put in place systems that address these issues for services today, and we continue to build on those systems to plan for the future.

Additionally, in July, OCLC will implement the use of its secondary data center for active/passive service configurations, which can fail-over and back in minutes with minimal manual intervention. In the future, we will be able to use the secondary data center for active/active service configurations, where services are load balanced in both data centers.

Please let Julie know if there are any questions regarding the outage. Thanks for your patience!