[Solved] UM overloaded by human-faced lamb

[Saru]

Apologies for the disruptions to the site this morning, this was due to a ridiculously large amount of traffic hammering a single thread on the forums about a lamb being born with a human face - here. At one point there were several thousand people viewing it at the same time, a lot more than our servers can handle.

To remedy this i've redirected the thread to a temporary low-resource page with the story on it, the original thread will be restored once the influx of traffic to it dies down.

In the meantime you can also view this story on our front page news - here.

[schizoidwoman]

You're right, it could only happen on UM!

[Rosewin]

I saw right before I went to bed, around 8 hours ago, there were 53 guests looking at it and I thought 'wow' that was lots...but thousands lol? I should have stayed up a bit longer! Did we get any new members out of it?

[Saru]

Its possible, i'm sure some of them will stick around.

I've just tracked the source of the traffic to a news site in Turkey, the country from which the lamb story originated.

[xCrimsonx]

I saw right before I went to bed, around 8 hours ago, there were 53 guests looking at it and I thought 'wow' that was lots...but thousands lol? I should have stayed up a bit longer! Did we get any new members out of it?

Theirs been like 11 newbies since about 5 hours ago?! UM rocks is all!

[Space Commander Travis]

It could be the new Blossom Goodchild.

[Saru]

The original thread link is now directing the traffic to the front page news story on the topic and the posts that were in it have been combined with two other threads on the subject to act as the comments thread for that story.

There's still a fair bit of traffic to it but it is now at managable levels. Looks like the topic of the "human-faced lamb" is a lot more popular than I would have anticipated, its generated a huge amount of interest both here and elsewhere.

[Black Hound]

Apologies for the disruptions to the site this morning, this was due to a ridiculously large amount of traffic hammering a single thread on the forums about a lamb being born with a human face - here. At one point there were several thousand people viewing it at the same time, a lot more than our servers can handle.

To remedy this i've redirected the thread to a temporary low-resource page with the story on it, the original thread will be restored once the influx of traffic to it dies down.

In the meantime you can also view this story on our front page news - here.

To me, no apologies are necessary considering the havoc you were dealing with. It is appreciated that you took time to explain, not many would do.

Edited January 31, 2010 by Graveyard Hound

[Saru]

Not a problem, thank you.

Fortunately this particular issue was resolved a couple of weeks ago so i'll set this thread to complete.