Genealogists who have had problems trying to log into Ancestry.com recently need not worry. It wasn’t caused by your computer, and it wasn’t due to hacking (probably). The popular genealogy website is aware of the site outages, and will let you know when things are back online.
It doesn’t take much to ruin a genealogists evening sometimes. Those of you who have paid for a membership at Ancestry.com probably expect that the website will be available to you whenever you want to use it. Unfortunately, every website needs to go down for maintenance eventually.
Once in a while, you run into an issue where your favorite website is inaccessible, and you don’t know what the reason behind it is. It is understandable to be frustrated when this happens. On August 9, 2012, Ancestry.com posted this status on its Facebook page:
“We are aware of the site outages right now. We apologize for an inconvenience and working to resolve the issue. We’ll let you know as soon as everything is back online”.
This was posted at around 9:43 in the evening PT on August 9, 2012. I am writing this blog about an hour after that, and there haven’t been any updates from Ancestry.com yet in regards to the site outages. There are quite a few genealogists who have left comments expressing their relief to know that Ancestry.com was aware of the situation. Some thought that their computers were the problem, and others worried that their account had been hacked.
I can understand why people had concerns about being hacked. Earlier today, the extremely popular video game company called Blizzard Entertainment released a statement about an important security update. In short, the company wanted to warn people to change their passwords because their “security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard”. I, of course, immediately followed the recommended steps to keeping my account secure.
Earlier this month, a reporter named Mat Honan wrote a blog about how his Twitter account and Gmail account got hacked, and that the hacker remotely wiped all the data off Mr. Honan’s iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. Imagine losing all your genealogy data, just that quickly!
I’ll leave you to read the entire blog for further details. The quick explanation is that it seems as though a hacker was able to access all of Mr. Honan’s accounts, computers, and data through the iCloud.
Now, I am not trying to say that Ancestry.com’s site outage means that the website was hacked. What I am saying is that I understand why some members of Ancestry.com are fearful that it could be a hack. Hopefully, Ancestry.com will fix everything and post a blog about it with more details. Until then, don’t panic! Your computer is probably functioning as it should. Ancestry.com is having site outages.
Image by Jim Linwood on Flickr