It just smells a bit funny, according to disgruntled users.
UK-based public-transport photo gallery site Fotopic.net went down at the beginning of the weekend.
The owners Snappy Design issued no statements or pointed the domain name at an informational site but former owner Joel Rowbottom (under his net persona “CapnB”) posted an explanation on protest newsgroup Former Fotopic Users:
I’ve just got off the phone after managing to track down one of the
directors of Snappy Designs. I asked them to post here but they have
declined (I reckon because they can’t get in touch with their PR
people at this hour).
Therefore here is the news as I understand it:
1. The reason it’s unavailable *is* a hardware fault with the
interface to the outside world. The gentleman I discussed the
situation with isn’t an IP engineer so was unable to give me solid
details on how it’s failed but if I can be of assistance in getting it
back up I will be - sadly the old Cisco 4000 series in my garage won’t
cut the mustard with at least a partial routemap! The router is
intentionally powered down which could mean anything from a router
failure to a cabling fault.
2. Snappy Designs is solvent - and they’re injecting more cash into it
to sort out Printshop and the rest. At that point (apparently) the
Printshop system will change somewhat and be more “automatic”. I don’t
have any more on that so please don’t ask me for further details.
3. There is a plan to give Plus/Premium users at least a fortnight
extension across the board.
4. It’s *hoped* that it will be back in the early hours of Monday
morning. I make that a 72-hour outage. I will keep track of what’s
going on and see if I can get further information tomorrow.
5. The architecture for Fotopic.net is still largely the same as when
we left in May. This means that when it comes back it should be mostly
OK - the image servers will probably take about 20 minutes to populate
their caches during which it’ll be a bit slower than usual. I have
volunteered to be on standby to help the engineers if required.
6. There will be a full statement going out to all Premium/Plus users
when it’s back, which will explain things. I did ask if they had any
plans to email their users prior to the recommencement of service but
there are no facilities to email upwards of 60,000 people without the
servers to handle it (which I can well believe, we have some
“interesting” issues emailing Yahoo people en-masse for instance). SD
said a statement will come pretty sharpish tho.
7. I’ll be having discussions with Snappy Designs about the future of
Fotopic.net, but please remember that myself and Nicky have been away
from the front-line since May (with the exception of assisting with
the odd support mail nobody else could answer, or when I’ve tried to
assist with things they didn’t understand yet). So please, please,
please, the “Mr Angry” emails have to stop or I’m going to have to put
this down again. I’m just trying to help here.
The news about the Fotopic outage will be updated as more news become available.
The Hobby Photographer also uses Fotopic.net for image hosting and looks forward to a return to service.