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connordoner
For anyone looking on this from the future, the error page has Content-Type set to text/html but literally returns the text: "The service is unavailable." and a newline character.
msoad 

        *   Trying 151.101.1.69:80...
        * Connected to stackoverflow.com (151.101.1.69) port 80 (#0)
        > GET / HTTP/1.1
        > Host: stackoverflow.com
        > User-Agent: curl/7.79.1
        > Accept: */*
        > 
        * Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
        < HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
        < content-type: text/html
        < Content-Length: 27
        < Accept-Ranges: bytes
        < Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2022 14:58:39 GMT
        < Via: 1.1 varnish
        < Connection: keep-alive
        < X-Served-By: cache-lga21957-LGA
        < X-Cache: MISS
        < X-Cache-Hits: 0
        < X-Timer: S1659538719.045867,VS0,VE2
        < Vary: Fastly-SSL
        < X-DNS-Prefetch-Control: off
        < Set-Cookie: prov=f6b7f757-544e-1afc-3cc2-e13af9fc8932; domain=.stackoverflow.com; expires=Fri, 01-Jan-2055 00:00:00 GMT; path=/; HttpOnly
        < 
        * Connection #0 to host stackoverflow.com left intact
        The service is unavailable.⏎
ravenstine
That's valid HTML.
goto11
A title-element is required for the HTML to be valid. It is the only required element AFAIK.
[dead] Victerius
ollien
I know you're joking, but an SE employee (I believe it was Nick Craver, who is now a former SE SRE) mentioned on Twitter a while ago that employees use database backups and spin up local instances for exactly this reason...
zshrdlu
Sounds a lot less straight-forward than using the cached result from Google or acrhive.org...
iasay
They wouldn't find a solution because all the good answers were moderated away into oblivion :D
mwint
I’ll undelete any good answer you link to here.
mark-r
The biggest tragedy is good answers to bad questions. The answer might teach you something you never knew before, but if the question is judged harshly it might get deleted or hidden in search results.
mellosouls
It had the same issue the other day, at least for a few minutes, so possibly an ongoing glitch?
jollyllama
So what is their stack, or where can I find more about it? A totally custom webserver? Someone commented to this effect the yesterday [1], but I couldn't find much in the way of a good writeup, except this answer from 2009 [2].

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321726 2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/676326/how-does-stackove...

brightball
I remember hearing that they are a .NET stack with C# and SQL Server.

The only reason I know that is because I was working at a company and discussing the issues the company was running into scaling SQL Server and Stack Overflow was used as a counter example of SQL Server scalability. It lead into a long discussion of caching on high read workloads.

I'll never touch SQL Server again if I can help it.

kadonoishi
builtwith.com gives a lot of information, although the results page comes back with a "Misleading Technology Profile Warning".
bakje
Not specifically stackoverflow, but here is an answer on stackexchange [1] listing many of the parts that make up their stack.

I'm assuming stackoverflow runs as a part of all this, and not separately.

1 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/10370

artimaeis
Scott Hanselman had an interview with the Stack Overflow Director of Engineering just a few weeks ago. They cover some high-level details there [0]. As I understand it's an .NET Core monolith with a very-large (~1.5 TB RAM) SQL Server backend.

[0] https://hanselminutes.com/847/engineering-stack-overflow-wit...

ec109685
One thing about using SQL databases live in production for everything is that the architecture is amazingly simple, almost always performant, but if something goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong.

Amazon for new critical applications prefers NoSQL solutions for this reason since performance is flatter and not dependent on vagaries of the query optimizer.

alexjplant
From what I've gleaned through speaking to current and former Amazon employees you basically have to use DynamoDB for all new services.

IMHO the logical progression for applications with typical relational models is starting with an RDBMS in combination with an ORM, breaking out of the ORM when necessary for more complex/slower queries, ditching the ORM altogether when it starts to break, then evaluating sharding or moving domains into a NoSQL solution piecemeal. A well-architected monolith or series of microservices suits this paradigm which allows you to realize the productivity benefits of SQL and only worry about the deduplication, indexing, and consistency issues that come with NoSQL when it becomes actually necessary.

Then again if I were Amazon I'd probably plan for scale up front and be jaded by their experience with Oracle too.

blacklight
And this is at least the 4th or 5th time within 10 days that either the website is down or performance is badly degraded.

So bad for a website that is basically the go-to resource where IT professionals get their answers.

So bad that the whole platform is closed-source, so we can't even spin multiple instances.

The main resource used by developers and sysadmins around the world is locked and centralized, and when that central place goes down all the answers go down with it.

We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

And, most of all, we need alternatives that are open and decentralized, and we need them right now.

amanj41
If you use brave browser it usually is able to point you to corresponding web archive pages when SO is down. Nice to have it directly integrated into the browser
Pengtuzi
> we'll do the scraping for them

Awesome! Let us know when we can start using your new open source service, it must be mirrored and need it right now.

zufallsheld
Stackoverflow's data is cc-by-sa 4.0 licensed and can be found here: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

So nothing is stopping anyone to spin-up multiple instances.

mark-r
It's much harder to work with the data if you don't have the code. SO is not open source.
MonkeyMalarky
IMO it would be more interesting to not use their code and build some kind of specialized search service. One that learns to rank results from user metrics and feedback?
he_is_legend
so like personalised google search, with the terrible results that that inevitably produces for code related content?

i am confused though. how do you think SO currently works? Both questions and answers are already ranked via user metrics (individual upvotes and historical upvotes) and feedback (comments)?

Wowfunhappy
StackExchange is by no means perfect, but the copyleft content license is a key reason I feel comfortable contributing to the platform. (Which I assume is why they do it.)
someguy5344523
> We need crawlers and scrapers to download EVERYTHING out of the SE platforms, and they need to do so on a daily basis. All content on SE must be mirrored across the world, and if they don't want to do it then we'll do the scraping for them.

I think that's already the case. Whenever I look up a technical issue, the first result is usually from SO; the next results are usually from websites that copied that first SO page

rr888
You're lucky, for me recently its the other way around, spam copies first.
pugworthy
I’m not trying to be funny but it’s interesting how much panic one can read in the parent comment.

We all joke about the dependency on SO. It seems to actually be more true than perhaps we’d like to admit.

300bps
It’s unjustified panic. It’s freely downloadable and available everywhere.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
racl101
You mean I gotta start thinking on my own?

Not sure that will work.

mproud
Time to take a long lunch. Hopefully it’ll be back soon, otherwise I’ll have to invent a reason to give to my boss on why I can’t get back to the office!
hokkos
Finally we can't thanks the spam copies, they assure the vital service of caching the site when it goes down.
ctvo
SE has been an incredibly well ran company.

- FREE

- Permissive content license

- Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer

- Few / limited ads

- Data available at archive.org

- Still independently owned. Imagine AWS or Microsoft buying it. Oof.

I think about LinkedIn, Github, ... the other large platforms we use for work, and SE is the only one that hasn't gone downhill.

No, I don't want them to open source the platform. No, I don't think you can do better. Yes, a few mirrors for redundancy would be excellent, but not urgent. Discoverability here would be the challenge for mirrors. They've been down less than a day total for me in 10+ years of using them.

donmcronald
> Doesn't require me to log in to read an answer

The cookie dialog being different on every site is infuriating if you’re not logged in.

motbus3
I hope they are financially well because it is one of the few online things I think it works.

it is only bad they are having some many outages these days. I am not complaining for me. but it means something is happening there

pkstn
They're having stack overflow?
ankaAr
It could sound like a joke, but when I applied years ago to be a sysadmin for an Antartica base, they let me travel with whatever I want.

My first option was a full copy of stackoverflow. No joke.

Now, I'm reading this 5 hours letter and everything is ok, but what a wonderful site.

iostream25
Cue jokes like "... and today was 32% less productive for developers worldwide"