As many of you know the IT staff has been doing some maintenance on the system over the past couple days.

While mostly stable now, there are sporadic cases of a "Service Unavailable" message appearing when trying to load pages.

We are aware of the issue and ongoing IT changes should ultimately cure this problem. Thanks for your continued patience while we work through this issue.

Also, I know many Admins here are or were IT professionals, and you like to know what's going on.

For those interested, a rare bug in software we use made by Adobe causes a 503 error ("Service Unavailable" message) when the system is hit by heavy traffic (it's reunion season so traffic is very high right now). The bug actually knocks out IIS itself (a native function of Windows).

Patches for this known issue (Adobe Update 4) didn't solve the problem. There are various workarounds, configuration changes, and creation of additional server instances all possible to deal with this issue.

The IT folks are aware of the options available and will be working through them until all instances of the "Service Unavailable" message are gone.

Although somewhat rare these days fortunately, IT issues do happen from time to time, and whenever they do it's our top priority to get them resolved.

We sincerely apologize for any disruption you may experience while navigating your site until this issue is resolved (hopefully by weekend end).

I presume this is also affecting messages sent from the site. I sent a test message to myself at 9:30am this morning and at 7:30pm it has still not been received.

Message arrived at 8:40am this morning.

Posted about this in another forum but this was due to new clustering we are doing to handle significantly increased traffic. It shouldn't happen again.