Wikia Search having problems
It looks like there's a bit of trouble over at Wikia Search this morning.
The search portal, run by Wikia, the for-profit wiki service co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was returning "Service Unavailable" error messages about 10 percent of the time, during a test I ran on both Firefox and Safari.
This error message was coming up some of the time Wednesday morning after attempting to load the Wikia Search home page. The problem was found on both Firefox and Safari, but only about 10 percent of the time.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)The rest of the time, the service seemed to be working mainly as it should, though from time to time, the search page would only partially load.
The error message would return when loading the Wikia Search home page, and read, "Error 503 Service Unavailable." It continued, "Guru Meditation:" and then "XID:" and a nine-digit string that changed each time I found it.
The site Pingdom.com reported earlier Wednesday morning that Wikia Search's problems had been happening since Monday, and were occurring about a third of the time, but my tests revealed that it wasn't that severe.
Pingdom.com also had a chart suggesting that the search site's uptime was only about 65 percent.
When the site's home page did run, it then returned search results with no problem.
The rest of the time, the service worked as normal.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)In October, Valleywag reported that Wikia had laid off about a third of its 43-person workforce.
A call to Wikia for comment wasn't immediately returned.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel.
Anybody else notice that 35% downtime on Wikia Search hasn't so much as received a blip of attention, other than Pingdom and this post? Sounds like nobody's even using Wikia Search.