The CBC website had what we call in the online world “technical difficulties” yesterday. In other words, a bit of equipment failed, the site crashed and staff were rushed around to put the website back up and keep it updated.
The cause of the problem? A hard drive failure. From the CBC blog:
” Early Monday morning (around midnight ET) for some reason, the NAS (network attached storage — basically a really big hard disk) went into read-only mode. This meant that no new data could be written to the site.”
This is the sort of thing that sends website editors rushing to see the technical folks and badger them every five minutes.
In this case, since the hard drive held more than a terabyte of data, checking for errors took an eternity. But CBC.ca were able to work from the backups and restore a basic site. To some, like my friend Robert Ouimet, this was an improvement:
“Actually, the ’scaled back’ version of CBC.CA is delightfully easier to use than the real thing. I say if this is broken, don’t fix it !”
PDF