Scott Rutherford, our CTO here at UserVoice, really, really wanted to go to the baseball game this weekend. Unfortunately for him, duty called.

On Sunday at around noon, the DNS provider that UserVoice employs (as do many, many other sites), ZoneEdit, suffered major downtime, causing a significant number of UserVoice forums to become unavailable. Scott caught this issue quickly and moved us to a new DNS provider, Dynect (Kyle of Dynect was kind enough to offer us a free trial when he saw that we were having issues – great Twitter marketing case study, incidentally).

Because of ISP caching, it can take up to 72 hours for new DNS settings to propagate. For this reason our forums may not be 100% back in action until noon PST on Wednesday. However, it’s our assessment that most if not all of the forums should now be available. If you continue to experience any issues, please email support at uservoice dot com and we will look into it promptly.

We regret any downtime you may have experienced…unfortunately, this was hard to predict. ZoneEdit is used by many companies and we did not anticipate any issues with their service. We had redundancy built into our ZoneEdit account, but as their entire system suffered, so did our redundancies. Going forward we’ll be using both a primary DNS provider and a fallback provider. Barring crazy internet armageddon, this should help us avoid this issue happening again.

If you’re not already following us on Twitter, we recommend you get familiar with our Twitter page (don’t have a Twitter account? No worries – you can still read the updates on the page). This is our #1 location for posting news about issues (and won’t go down if our site does), so you should look there first if you’re having any problems. You can generally get more detailed updates about issues on our statusblog.

Thanks for your patience,

Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice
evan at uservoice dot com

Photo by Brandon Satterwhite