# Downtime

db<>fiddle had an hour of downtime this morning — it wasn't unplanned, but it was unannounced (we thought we'd try and sneak it in while America was sleeping).

# Why?

The main reason is that we need to move the physical hardware between two racks in the DC (and also onto a new IP address). The primary hardware hasn't moved yet, but it is now idle, and we are hoping to do the physical move this evening. 

If all goes well, at some point in the next few days we'll move all the backend VMs onto the original hardware in the new location, but the main site should keep operating as normal during that move, and each backend will only have minimal downtime as they are moved one by one.

This has been a bit of a rush job. We knew we had to move before June, so we thought we had plenty of time, but events, dear boy, events.

# The good news

We made a few tweaks and fixed a few bugs along the way so you may notice fiddles display faster, and some will run faster too. We also patched most of the backends though of course Microsoft released CU4 for SQL Server 2019 yesterday so we are behind again!

# The not so good news

Quite a number of backend VMs are currently unavailable. Most of these will be up and running over the next day or so, but please bear with us while they are down. Some will be retired permanently, like postgres 8.4 and SQLite 3.8, because of unsolvable security issues.

Please let us know if you spot anything missing — the databases have all been built from scratch again for the new platform, and we may have missed some things like extensions along the way.