Dear colleagues, On Saturday 30 June 2012 there was an outage on the RIPE Database update service from 05:58 UTC (07:58 CEST) until 07:55 UTC (9:55 CEST) due to hardware issues. During this failure, no email updates were lost and no corruption of the RIPE Database occurred. The query service, which is running our new whois software, was not affected at all. Currently the update service runs on a single, active server backed up by a redundant failover machine. We use database replication to keep the hot standby ready, but there is no automatic failover. A decision was made to first try to recover the failed primary update server. When this was unsuccessful, our 24/7 engineers manually switched to the secondary server and the slave database was set as the master. Unfortunately the old legacy update system does not allow for operation of a cluster of update servers or automated failover from master to slave database. We have looked at building this into the system in the past, but the whole legacy software was simply not designed with this in mind. As announced at RIPE 64, the RIPE NCC is completely re-writing all of the legacy RIPE Database software. The query service is already fully running new, re-written code, load balanced across a cluster of servers with a high degree of redundancy. We are currently working on re-writing the update service. A load balanced cluster of servers is one of the primary goals of a new RIPE Database update service. This would avoid a repeat of the outage this weekend. We'd like to apologise again for any inconvenience caused. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Regards, Denis Walker Business Analyst RIPE NCC Database Group