IS THE USCIS CASE STATUS PAGE DOWN?

[Jon York 156]

For high-profile websites they should be using redundant servers like banks, and large sales websites. That means when the run the live server, there is at least one other server that has all the code that is used for testing and updating. If you just have a mom-and-pop website then you can take it down and put it up whenever you feel like it. That doesn't work if you have more than a few hundred people visiting every day.

Haha! Like government is going to figure that out! This is just like the obamacare website fiasco.

[Jon York 156]

Are you for real? It's technology, things happen. The entire time my husband's case was processing the site was down, yes for months and months. Not only did we survive,we lived to tell about it. Why do people panic when they cannot check their status on a weekend whne nothing is going to change in the first place. Chill out people, back away from the computer and go out and get some air.

Things like this don't happen in the private sector for this long. When has Amazon or Google ever been down for three days straight?

I agree that I think people can live without checking their status over the weekend! It's not like anything is going to change. But some people need to get information from there. But whether they'll live or die really isn't the issue. The issue is incompetence and waste. I work in the internet sector - specifically related to web servers, and it really is unacceptable for a site for an agency this large to ever be down for this long. And it's completely avoidable if you're managing things properly which obviously they're not.

Edited February 23, 2014 by Jon York

[Zcomuto 16]

For high-profile websites they should be using redundant servers like banks, and large sales websites. That means when the run the live server, there is at least one other server that has all the code that is used for testing and updating. If you just have a mom-and-pop website then you can take it down and put it up whenever you feel like it. That doesn't work if you have more than a few hundred people visiting every day.

It's a case of priorities, though.

The very livelihood of a bank's existence depends upon servers, somewhere, being active. Those aren't the ones the customer uses to connect to internet banking, those are the ones that store electronic records of accounts and connect with markets. Those things, if they go down, will loose 4 or 5 digits a second, so there's a massive desire to get 99.999% uptime. Likewise, the US government has important servers - extremely important ones - which carry priorities which are probably quite invisible (and most likely unimportant) to the average user.

A site like USCIS' immigration portal whilst isn, on a whole, important - it's the ability to check and it's a non-priority convenience. It being down won't cost a lot of money, but probably will cause a little of frustration and some people loosing faith, however there's no large, tangible loss so the extra cost of getting an on-call server technician out of bed on a weekend most likely isn't worth the investment.

About backups: likely, they do. The whole site will be stored somewhere, but achieving completely faultless backup is an impossible task, there's only so far you can go whilst still being economically feasible. Servers are not cheap devices.

The whole https://egov.uscis.gov/ domain seems down rather than just the checking service, so there's a server somewhere that's been disconnected for some reason.

[piticli 0]

Anyway, service is working again, so the paranoids as me can still pushing F5 and overload the USCIS servers LoL