VPS 761-0 preventing Thunderbird Hotmail access

[alanrf]

Many thanks to kubecj and the avast! team for the quick response.

While I certainly agree that the thanks are due given the size of the affected population I cannot agree that this was a quick response. 

I hope that the Alwil management team will review their responsiveness given that this sizable VPS update was released just after midnight (local time to the avast team) and their capability to deal with a large affected population at that hour.

[news]

alanrf...
While it may not have been rapid response...it was truly very quick to me.

I've run into far more grave situations with software...and the problems were not handled nearly as fast as this team of folks handled this.

I'm pleased with the way things went. Could have been far worse...and for me...it has been. Just my opinion is all.

[alanrf]

Depends on your perspective - I have had the job of being responsible for worldwide availability of services for major corporations (a well known bank and a well known airline) 24x7.  The difference there was, of course, the major financial impact to those corporations of even the briefest outages.  I am very familiar with the pager going off in the middle of the night. 

For avast it is their reputation - if they take out access by their users to major functions like Hotmail or GMail for any lengthy period (and I consider >8 hours lengthy) it certainly is not enhancing it.   

[DavidR]

Yes the response could have been quicker somewhere between 8 and 12 hours in this case, well under 8 hours (5 I beileve) for the PayPal issue.

That however could be down to the VPS release time as you mention, releasing a largish update late at night will always be at risk of adding about 4-6 hours to response time. Perhaps that is something that needs to be addressed, releasing only critical updates in the we small hours, with lessor priority updates released the next morning.

[Vlk]

I agree that we could have done better.

Just to explain little bit, the reason that the update was released at roughly 1:30am our time is that 1:00am to 6:00am is the most idle period of the day for our updating servers. The update was almost 200KB in size (relatively large), and so we needed to avoid releasing it during the rush hours (let's do some math: there's 34+ millions of users, and roughly 60% of them are connected permanenty; these usually get updated during the first 4 hours [that's the default update check interval]. That is, 20 millions of people times 0.2MB equals to 4 TB during 4 hours - equivalent to the need of a 2.2 GBit/s continuous stream - something our updating infrastructure [currently consisting of ~150 servers] can barely withstand).

But that doesn't change anything on the fact that there should've been someone ready to solve potential problems.

I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

Thanks
Vlk

[polonus]

Hi Vlk,

That is inconvenient for those concerned, but that leaves even more people without noticing it even.
And that is good for the users of an AV product, I missed out on some of Avast's FP's because I did download at another point in time, or while the case was already fixed when I got to it. So every thing has two sides to it.
Just a question apart from the downloading capacity, I think Avast is getting more and more popular. What is your personal opinion on this?

polonus

[alanrf]

vlk

it is clear you have the point - many thanks for your response.

DavidR

thanks for staying up so late to help.

Polonus - don't worry - those of us living on the other side of the planet will investigate the problems while you sleep so that you are not affected when you wake up.