NewsOK.com struggled through Tuesday afternoon

If you were on NewsOK.com yesterday afternoon or evening, you noticed something unusual:

NewsOK simply wasn’t responding like it should.

We noticed the problem at about 3:20 p.m., and our programmers, developers and server administrators immediately began investigating. The site was up and down intermittently through the next six or seven hours, but the same loading problems persisted (I could try to explain in further detail, but I’m sure I’d mess up the terminology and end up sounding silly).

By about 9:30 p.m., the site was back up and functioning properly. It’s been loading fine since then.

We apologize for the inconvenience to our users yesterday, as stories about Jessica Alba, the private school-public school debate in high school sports and weather stories highlighted the traffic we should have received. We know that delivering news and information is important to you. So now we have a decent back-up plan in case we experience similar problems. We will be able to deliver news if it happens again today.

Frankly, I’ve been working with NewsOK for almost 10 years, and I’ve never seen the source of any site performance issues be so elusive to our engineers. I watched as they systematically identified, investigated, tested and ruled out dozens of possible problems. Sometimes, bad things happen. We can only learn, prepare ourselves and move on.

Or it could be what one of our users hypothesized last night in a comment on an article about the issues:

Liberal conspiracy

I don’t think that was it, but we’ll investigate. Thanks.