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Since You Asked: Turkey Day website outage started in Sweden Dec 04, 2022 12:30 AM A A What happened to the Mail Tribune website on Thanksgiving? Did everybody take the day off and pull the plug on the website so you could watch football? What gives? — Kenneth O., Medford You actually aren’t all that far off, Kenneth. Somebody did pull the plug on our website, metaphorically speaking. The first thing to understand is it wasn’t Thanksgiving in Sweden, which is where something called an “environmental cleanup” was occurring at the company that hosts our website. “Environmental cleanup” is IT-speak for deleting files, though it’s a little more extensive than that. Think LOTS of files. At 5 a.m. our time, a person in Sweden was deleting a website that was no longer active. Turns out the name of the company that owned the defunct website started with the letters M-E-D, which happen to be the same happy letters that begin the word M-E-D-F-O-R-D. So while the Swedish technician was busy gathering up the files to delete, they also swept the Medford Mail Tribune website files into the same dustbin and torched our site along with company M-E-D. This explanation of human error, rather than something more ominous like a targeted attack on your hometown newspaper, was explained to us this week as part of an RCA, which is more tech speak for “root cause analysis.” Apparently an RCA is something that gets generated after somebody messes up really badly. Shortly before the sun rose Thursday, a member of our newsroom staff fired up their iPhone to make sure everything looked as it should at mailtribune.com , only to be greeted with the dreaded message “server not found,” which led to support tickets being sent to IT people along the lines of, “Help. The Mail Tribune website is dead in the water.” Right about the time the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was getting ready to roll, we got a message from the troubleshooters that our website was not down, it was gone — as if it never existed. That led to more than 300 hours of combined labor on Thanksgiving and Black Friday by numerous people in numerous locations to reassemble our website using archived data. Many deviled eggs and half-warm plates of turkey and stuffing were consumed during the process, but not in the company of loved ones. As of midweek, small glitches were still being ironed out, but it appears that all of our past stories, photos and videos were saved. The only things lost were Thanksgiving dinner, hours of football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Maybe next year. Send questions to “Since You Asked,” Mail Tribune Newsroom, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501; or by email to [email protected].