Stack Overflow suffered an outage yesterday

2 min read

Yesterday the Stack Overflow site was down according to its status report on the site. The outage map reported, 931 issues on the Stack Overflow site originating from the United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Brazil and 67 more countries.

The official page read, “We apologize for any inconvenience, but an unexpected error occurred while you were browsing our site. It’s not you, it’s us. This is our fault.”

Downdetector also reports of the Stack Overflow outage starting at 12:30 am PDT. It shows 79% of the problems are related to the website and 20% are on its log-in page.

Though there are no reports from the official Stack Overflow page or on their Twitter handle of the issues being resolved and the site being functional, Nick Craver, lead engineer and site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow tweeted yesterday at 1:30 pm PDT, “All systems are green now – a non-yielding scheduler inside our primary SQL Server caused a cascade failure of systems that depend upon it. We’ll follow-up with vendors and increase our resiliency in several systems here.”

On Hacker News, users speculated that the issue might have been caused due to a roll out of one particular branch in Stack Overflow model over to netcoreapp2.2.

One of the users commented, “2 hours earlier:

‘We’ll be carefully rolling this out starting shortly’ .. oopsie, debug mode in production commence.”

Another user comments, “The question is how are they gonna fix it without stackoverflow?”

They are also annoyed with the lack of communication from the Stack Overflow team, “What’s up here? I don’t see any updates on their twitter or blog. What am I gonna do the rest of the day??”

Last week, Stack Overflow users took to its Meta site to express concerns regarding the communication breakdown between the site and its community. The users highlighted that Stack Overflow has repeatedly failed at consulting the community before coming up with a major change, with the most recent case being the removal of the “Hot Meta Posts” section.