Technical Issues

I was reading The Paradigm Shift and notice some comments about members not being able to access PlentyOfFish.com. I just tried it myself and it looks to be true. Plenty Of Fish appears to have gone down at least an hour ago, around 4pm eastern standard time. The internet browser returns a HTTP 400 error, which seems to suggest that the actual web server is experiencing problems. The last time that we know of when Plenty of Fish went down was mid July 2008, when there was a fire which knocked out power to the building where their servers are housed.

Update #1: As of 8:00pm EST all seems back to normal. PlentyOfFish.com is now back online.

Update #2: March 1, 2009 - I notice this morning that PlentyOfFish.com is still online but is really slow. You also may get server out of memory errors when you attempt to login or perform searches.

Update #3: March 1, 2009 - As of noon, things seem to be back to normal again.

Update #4: August 9, 2010 - For those of you reading this post about POF being offline today, for more information and updates read: Plenty of Fish is Down - August 9, 2010

For more information on this dating site, read our Plenty Of Fish review.

For the last few months Gay.com has been updating not only their dating website software but the hardware as well. From the new updates, one website called QUEERTY has reported that Gay.com has been offline more than it has been online this month. If this is the case, I would hope Gay.com gives paying members another month for FREE to thank them for putting up with all the trouble.

Here is a quote from Gay.com's Blog about some of the issues:

So what can you expect in the days ahead in terms of on-going improvements and our communication to you about them?

1. We are adjusting our hardware configurations and software code to further speed processes. Despite extensive pre-launch testing, a site of the scale and complexity of gay.com is virtually impossible to emulate in a test lab. Additionally, we have seen new usage patterns from the site that we could not model and are adjusting our hardware and code to streamline and improve performance. With the addition of more servers earlier in the week, we have seen positive results in overall site speed. We continue to monitor site performance and may add additional capacity as necessary.
2. We continue to identify and fix the bugs that have resulted in unplanned system outages.
3. We are committed to customer service and getting everyone on the site. We have received a tremendous number of phone calls and emails with your questions and suggestions. We are working to meet your needs as fast as we can. We also know that many people still cannot get into chat for technical reasons. Should you need help immediately, we keep an up-to-date Known Issues link on our blog at http://gay.blogs.com/gaycomblog.
4. We promise to be as open as possible in our communication to you. We know these changes (both the relaunch itself and the follow-on outages) can be confusing and frustrating. We will do our best to let you know what is happening, and when and how it may affect you as a user of the site. Given the changes that we need to make, we know that we will need to have a few more planned outages. We will do everything possible to give everyone adequate advance warning of these outages. Whenever possible, planned outages will be conducted in off-peak hours.

Find out more and see the full apology letter to members at the company's blog. For more information about the dating site Gay.com, including costs and features of this matchmaking service, check out our Gay.com review.

According to Netcraft the social networking giant Facebook had a brief period of outages on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. The BBC were informed it only affected certain countries. Netcraft found the site unavailable from all of its collectors which are located in Pennsylvania, San Jose, Phoenix, New York, Virginia, Italy and the United Kingdom (London).

No new outages have been reported since Wednesday and the site had now been updated to fix the problem according to Facebook.