Photosynth Blackout Results in 'Missing Content' Errors

As of April 15th, Microsoft had resolved the blackout that took offline its Photosynth website, but was still working to make all content accessible to end users. On April 15, at 16:00 PST, the Redmond company had managed to bring back online approximately 50% of the content that was initially being reported as missing after the website went down the previous day. At the same time, the remaining half continued to be offline, with the software giant laboring to restore it.

Photosynth went offline on April 14th, and users experienced various problems for a few hours. “Around 7pm PST one of the data centers hosting our servers experienced a power failure,” a representative of the Photosynth team stated. “By unfortunate chance we were upgrading some of our database servers at the same time which caused a cascading failure. Our engineers are working around the clock to restore the service but in the meantime you may see missing thumbnails, our maintenance page, or other errors on the site while we troubleshoot. Synthing will also be impacted and you may see slow uploads or synthing may not work at all.”

Microsoft moved fast to deal with the problem, and got the majority of systems back online in a matter of hours. At that time, users of the Photosynth website were again able to access content, as well as upload new synths. However, the Redmond company continued to receive reports that some of the synths could not be viewed. Users trying to do so received the following error message: “This synth could not be loaded. The owner many have deleted it.”

“We are restoring these synths at the moment, and sometime tomorrow all synths created before 6pm PST on April 13th should be back online. Synths created during our power failure (7pm -- 11pm PST) are currently in limbo. The may get published tomorrow, but if you want access to them now, you'll need to re-synth them. I'll update this thread when the restored data is back online. Thank you for bearing with us,” the Photosynth team member added.