That's the first thing that crossed my mind this morning when the popular comment service provider, Disqus went offline. For those of you who aren't familiar with Disqus, pronounced "discuss", they provide a service for extending the comments and discussions on your website. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application, and it's free to the general public. So, if you use WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Movable Type, or a host of other blogware, plug em in. I have found that it makes the commenting on this website much more interactive.

I've been with them for quite some time and since nothing like this had occured in the past, I was immediately concerned. I was pleased when I finally reached their site and found that it was a false alarm that caused the outage. I'm sure the companies reaction was much different than mine. It appears the automated security software used by their hosting provider to prevent hack attacks, made a mistake and took the site down when it perceived a (DDoS) Direct Denial of Service attack. It turned out to be a false alarm. The site was only down for around 30 minutes but I'm sure it seemed like hours to the folks at Disqus.

In a message posted on the Disqus website, it stated "The main lesson for us here is that, regardless of the reason, mishaps are mishaps, and an important machine shouldn’t cause an outage in the service. We understand that. This is actually happening at a time when we are making large moves around redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. This basically means that we are making sure something like this, while it could happen again, won’t impact the reliability and performance of the service." And so we have a happy ending. What's your opinion, leave a comment and you can see how Disqus works.