When extremely popular genealogy websites go down, it doesn’t go unnoticed. Ancestry.com had a site outage on August 9, 2012 that seems to have carried over into August 10, 2012. It appears that whatever the problem was has been resolved now.
Last night, I was looking at the Ancestry.com Facebook page when I noticed something interesting. There was a status posted that said:
“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”.
Naturally, this was post got tons of comments from genealogists who were frustrated or frightened by the site outages. Some feared that the problem was within their own computer, and others worried that perhaps they forgot to pay their membership fee. There were many genealogists who expressed their irritation about the site being down, and others that suggested that people should calm down and let Ancestry.com fix the problem.
On August 10, 2012, at around 10:00 in the morning PT, Ancestry.com posted an update as a comment to the post about the site outages. It read:
“We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. While the majority of the site issues have been resolved, we are aware that some users may not be able to attach records to their trees and we are working to resolve that issue at this time. In the mean time, if you are experiencing other issues with the site, please try some of these suggestions mentioned here to resolve them:”
There was a link attached to that comment that led to a blog post on the Ancestry.com website. It is in a question and answer format. The question is: “How do I clear my Temporary Internet Files and increase its allotted size?”
The answer, in short, is for users of Ancestry.com to clear their Temporary Internet Files (cache and cookies) regularly. The blog goes on to walk you through how to do that with several different browsers Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 & 9, Firefox 7+, and Google Chrome. For Mac, it has directions for how to clear the Temporary Internet Files for Firefox 7+ and Safari 5.1.x.
There is no information on the Ancestry.com website, or the Ancestry.com blog, about what caused the site outage. There also isn’t any further information on their Facebook page. The good news, though, is that it appears that Ancestry.com has fixed whatever the problem was.
Image by Sh4r9_i on Flickr