I'm writing this from the eastern US (GMT-5), specifically Pennsylvania. On Sunday night of this week (Apr 15), the MBed.org site was completely offline for me for some hours. I grabbed the DNS translation by asking ARM's nameserver, and attempted to both ping and traceroute to see what was going on, to no avail - the traceroute stopped returning useful results somewhere outside of London.

As the problems during the evening here would roughly translate to midnight-5AM there, I hoped that it was simple site maintenance, and things would be up as normal. Imagine my surprise (and disappointment) when it was down again yesterday (Thursday, April 19th) morning, which would correlate to prime work-day time in Cambridge.

Is anyone else seeing this type of problem? Any idea if it's a routing issue that I can get around with creative proxying, or is there something going on at the hosting side itself? I use MBed in some of my engineering courses (I'm the faculty), and having to cancel lab because my students can't get to their code is a bit rough. Normally, I love the MBed online compiler - it keeps me from having to install, maintain, and update a locally hosted toolset. Still, the downtime I've seen recently is painful, so I'm wondering if it's just my end of things, or if there's a larger problem that's hopefully being addressed.

Hi Greg,

This morning we noticed two students mentioning a cancelled lab session on twitter so have looked into this but have come to the conclusion the problem is not a server issue. We have not had other reports and have not noticed any anomalies here. We monitor the site from 52 locations worldwide so we should spot a widespread problem more or less immediately.

We also try hard not to take the servers down for maintenance and weren't performing any at the times you've mentioned.

If the problem occurs again there are a few things you can do to help pinpoint the problem.

1. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mbed.org can tell you if the site seems to be up elsewhere or you can just try from your home computer.
2. Email your traceroute from any locations where it's not reachable to support@mbed.org

Thanks

Steve

Steve - Thanks for the information. That's exactly the type of info I was looking for, and leads me to believe it must be some sort of intermittent failure in getting our packets there (the rest of the internet, including ARM.com, worked fine, which was strange). I'll look into things on our end a bit more, and am disappointed that I deleted those traceroute logs rather shortsightedly not too long ago.