A number of users are having trouble connecting to Digsby right now.  We are working on the issue and will have this resolve as quickly as possible.  We’ll post an update here when it is fixed.

Update 1: Everything is back online.   We are still digesting what happened and will post an update here with an explanation of what went wrong and what we are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Update 2: We wanted to apologize again for the short outage we had on Friday.  Below is a semi-technical explanation of what happened. There was a network disruption, which caused a mass reconnect of all logged in users.  This happens sometimes and we usually handle it without any issues.  However, this time it ended up overloading the servers, causing them to crash.  This resulted another mass reconnect and another crash.  It took a few times for things to stabilize.  This happened because several things went wrong at the same time. The new authentication system we introduced in Build 41 didn’t run properly on multiple processors.  This cut the amount of logins each sever can handle to be 1/4 of actual capacity.  As a result, a queue began to build up of people who had connected but were waiting to authenticate.  This queue started to drain the RAM each server had, causing the crash.  A variety of things are being done to prevent this in the future.  We are fixing the authentication system so a mass reconnect does not slow things down.  We are adding RAM to add a little buffer room so if this does happen again, it doesn’t result in a crash. Lastly, we are optimizing how clients reconnect when they lose the connection to our servers.