# What happened today?  Were boards down?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-today-were-boards-down/118155>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [July 10, 2002, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-today-were-boards-down/118155 "2002-07-10T01:50:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ruffian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/71e660/32.png) [@Ruffian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruffian)\
**Post date:** [July 10, 2002, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-today-were-boards-down/118155/1 "2002-07-10T01:50:14Z")

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With everything as slow as it’s been, it’s hard to tell whether the server is overloaded or if it’s down completely. I was unable to access the boards at all today during what are normally peak hours–about 11:30am-4:30pm PST. I then noticed that the forums showed no new posts for threads between that approximate time, so I’d assume it was down for all.

Were you installing another hamster? 😉

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**Author:** ![dantheman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dantheman/32/9421_2.png) [@dantheman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dantheman)\
**Post date:** [July 10, 2002, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-today-were-boards-down/118155/2 "2002-07-10T02:01:22Z")

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It wasn’t just you. **Tuba** posted a message over on Fathom about it:

> [@](#):
>
> SDMB is experiencing technical difficulties.  
> July 9, 2002 2:35 pm edt
> 
> The Straight Dope Message Board ([www.straightdope.com](http://www.straightdope.com)) is experiencing an  
> outage of uncertain duration.
> 
> We’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as we find out, please continue  
> checking here, at our alternate board ([http://bb.bbboy.net/straightdope](http://bb.bbboy.net/straightdope)) and  
> at home for more information.

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**Author:** ![Ruffian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/71e660/32.png) [@Ruffian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruffian)\
**Post date:** [July 10, 2002, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-today-were-boards-down/118155/3 "2002-07-10T02:35:55Z")

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You know, I wonder if this was an outage for multiple different servers. AOL (hey, shut up) was down, or at least quirky, all day too, as was LimeWire.