Well, it hasn't been substantiated yet, but it appears that Ecademy has been 'out' for the best part of a day now.
Now, I've had my run-ins with Ecademy, principally because I dispute the membership numbers they've been claiming for the past few years. I also disapprove of their management style (I was a member for over five years).
Notwithstanding the above, I don't wish Tommy P and the gang any ill-will, so hopefully they'll soon be in a position to pay their telephone bill...
If anyone hears anything, please do let me know.
UPDATE AS OF 23:15 ON WEDNESDAY 15TH FEB, 2005
I just received the following good news. Apparently it's nothing to do with Ecademy's technical capabilities, it's all the fault of some of their suppliers... Dell in particular (although it seems that Cisco has something to do with it):
>>Ecademy: Yes down now for 5 hours we have hardware failure on all 7 Dell Bladeservers with redundancy failing 6 times on backup and recover
[19:43:55] Thomas Power says: recovery
we have Dell and Cisco on site now at Globix replacing all servers and routers however full recover is likely to be 24 hours total hardware failure
7 of these have failed on us today http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1855?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~page=1<<
Naturally, I'll post any news as and when I get it. In the meantime, the CEO of Last Thursday has made the following generous gesture:
A Note To Our Friends From Ecademy
We are very sorry to hear of the technical issues that have taken the Ecademy site down today. We understand that work is underway to fix these problems as soon as possible.
In the meantime we would like to extend you the hand of friendship and offer you a temporary home, here at Last Thursday, where you can keep in touch with members of your network etc. Private clubs are available for you to use and you are more than welcome to use our facilities to keep in touch with each other during this time. There is no obligation for you to stay here once Ecademy is back up and running and this offer is sincerely made as a gesture of goodwill between our two platforms.
Damon Surridge
CEO
Last Thursday Limited
I do think that's a friendly gesture.
SECOND UPDATE 24:25 16TH FEBRUARY, 2005
Last Thursday continue to be helpful. They've just made the following announcement:
LAST THURSDAY OFFERS HELP TO ECADEMY MEMBERS DURING SIGNIFICANT SITE OUTAGE
16th February 2006 00:00
The business and social networking platform Last Thursday (www.lastthursday.net) has offered members from fellow networking site The Ecademy, a temporary ‘home’ whilst the management there struggle to resolve major technical problems. The Ecademy went off-line early afternoon (GMT) Wednesday and was still down some twelve hours later.
Damon Surridge CEO of Last Thursday said,
“We have offered Ecademy members the ability to keep in touch with their personal network by using Last Thursday’s platform. They can use our private clubs and the Front Page to communicate with each other. This is a genuine good-will gesture – Last Thursday has many friends at Ecademy, and we can only imagine that they’re having a bit of a nightmare trying to resolve the technical issues.”
Last Thursday was launched last September and has been designed to offer a 21st century social networking organization for business people. Members meet on the last Thursday of every month at free meetings around the UK, Europe and Asia, but pay to be a member of an online platform which they can use to publish information and gain business intelligence. The concept is that people get to know other members socially in an informal environment, and in time, get to do business with people they have got to know and trust. This method of ‘slow networking’ has been developed as an antidote to the elevator pitch and business card fests that are a feature of more traditional networking organizations. www.lastthursday.net
currently attracts around 40,000 page views per day from its 1000 strong membership as well as a significant number of external visitors.
For further information, please contact:
Damon Surridge, CEO, Last Thursday Limited
+44 (0)20 7193 0695
Helen Moore, Director of Communications, Last Thursday Limited
+44 (0)20 8340 1043/+44 (0)7767 402984 Skype: helenmoore
They're clearly a really nice bunch at LT.
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THIRD UPDATE 09:30 17TH FEBRUARY, 2005
Happily, it looks as though Ecademy is back. According to member comments on the site, the outage lasted for approx. 36 hours and the management team managed to send initial explanatory emails to their preferred customers (Blackstars) after only 24 hours of the site going down.
Ouch!
Posted by dompannell at February 15, 2006 9:41 PM | TrackBack