XING: Uptimes, Downtimes – and what we do

XING is fully available 99.85% of the time.

It happens pretty rarely, but sometimes our platform is affected too by operational faults and malfunctions. Of course we try to keep these hiccups to an absolute minimum. Our content is stored and supplied from two different data processing centers for instance, which means that our users can be re-routed from one to the other dependently on demand and performance.  All systems have a failover cluster operation guaranteeing high performance and stability, as well as having sufficient reserves to cope better with peak loads. Making sure our platform is both available and fast is our number one priority.

Sometimes though, like last Wednesday’s morning for instance, we do encounter unforeseen problems. There isn’t an IT system anywhere that is 100% fault-tolerant – there will always be systematic single points of failure that will send part or all of the entire system crashing with them. In this latest case a defect network component corrupted a mechanism, which was specifically required to safeguard against failure (Spanning Tree Protocol). We will be analyzing and intercepting this error to make sure it doesn’t crop up again.

A look at the figures for the past twelve months shows that we are very close to our high targets, an average uptime ratio of 99.95%. In other words, this means that XING should not be offline for more than four hours and 2 minutes over the entire year. Or to put it yet another way: This is equivalent to around 44 seconds a day. Crashes affecting just certain parts of the platform have also been included in this statistic.

Here are the availability figures for the past twelve months:

To form a meaningful graph from these figures the vertical axis needs to be scaled up dramatically in order to see any fluctuations at all:

Chart: XING availability during the last twelve months.

Despite this record, every minute of downtime is a blow to us – as we know how important it is that our members can send messages, make contacts and network at any time. That’s why we’ll keep doing everything in our power to maximize stability and availability of our platform.