Dear Colleagues, This is a follow-up to the earlier message regarding the LIR Portal service outage that occurred earlier today. Further investigation into the loss of service has revealed that the downtime actually started at 21:15 (UTC), Monday, 7 September. The outage was caused by a configuration error of the Apache web server. The RIPE NCC has strict upgrade procedures that our staff follow to prevent this, but they do leave some room for human error, and this outage was the result of such an error. To minimise the chance of this happening again, we plan to include automated monitoring of our Apache configuration syntax to our monitoring system. A separate issue was responsible for the longer than usual time it took to recognise and fix the problem. Our monitoring system is set up to send text messages to a 24/7 engineer in case of outages such as this. From our logs, we can see that the system did indeed try to send an SMS about the outage yesterday at 21:15 (UTC), but was unable to connect to our mobile service provider. To minimise the chance of this happening again, we will reconfigure our monitoring system to fall back to another provider in case a message can not be sent out. I hope that you find this explanation of the cause of the outage and the steps we are taking to prevent it from happening again useful. Regards, Tim Bruijnzeels Service Manager LIR Portal RIPE NCC