Thursday 6 April 2017

Two top Irish genealogy sites have technical problems

Two of Ireland's essential genealogy websites – IrishGenealogy.ie and Genealogy.NationalArchives.ie – have been having problems all morning. They have a common server, so when one is down, there's a good likelihood the other is, too. Fortunately, these kinds of shared downtimes are usually sorted out pretty quickly, but this one has been going on since at least 7.30am, when I received my first notification of a problem, so, since it's now gone noon and there's still no resolution, I thought I'd do a quickie blogpost to confirm the state of play.

The home pages and non-database features of both sites are operating as normal. It's only when you select a database you want to search that the problem appears. Basically, nothing happens and then you get a 'Problem Loading Page' or '503 Service Unavailable' screenview.

Optimists please note: There is no suggestion that new records are being uploaded!

Techies are working to solve the problem and restore the databases to public use.

UPDATE, 2:05pm: All the databases appear to have been restored.

UPDATE, 2:30pm: Perhaps not fully, though. You can search the civil records database on IrishGenealogy.ie and see the index entries, but when you want to view an image, the response is 'Not found'. Similarly with the Census database on http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/, your search results will stop short of providing access to an image of the return; the response is 'Forbidden - you do not have authority...'. I've checked four of the databases on the NAI's site and in each case, you can't get access to the image. Clearly there's still some work to be done.

UPDATE, 7 April, 8:00am: The problems persist.

UPDATE, 7 April, 10:35am: The National Archives of Ireland has just tweeted: 'Some technical issues are continuing with our genealogy website. Images are not currently available. We are working to resolve the issue asap'.

UPDATE, 7 April, 11:25am:  The National Archives of Ireland has advised that the problem has been identified and the techies are working on correcting it.

UPDATE, 8 April, 10:30am: I'll keep an eye on the sites and update here if there's any change, but I rather expect the glitch has settled in for the weekend.

UPDATE, 10 April, 10:15am: National Archives of Ireland has tweeted apologies for the continuing technical issues. "Please be assured we are doing all that we can to resolve it."

UPDATE, 10 April, 11:30am: Hurrah! Full function appears to have been restored to both sites.