Is anyone's website down?

I was down for a while yesterday. Submitted a ticket and I was back up about 30 minutes later.

I just discovered that our site is down, too. I can't access either the user side or the administrator backend. We didn't receive any upgrade notice, either.

I got it resolved fairly quickly by submitting a help desk ticket and marking it urgent. Jared knows of the issue and knows how to fix it.
I still though don't know if my site was upgraded. And, I don't know if this issue is related to the upgrades in any way.

I thought we were supposed to be notified when our sites were to be upgraded and I never received any such communication so I assume that mine has not been upgraded yet.

Mine went down and it was not upgrade related. I hope to be notified when the upgrade goes through. I'd prefer the upgrade to be on a test version of my site so I can verify functionality before making live.

Serge,
My understanding is that there are no dev/test/prod environments for any of the 150+ sister sites. I would hope though that they make a copy of a site before the upgrade so it can be rolled back - just in case.
You can though create a sandbox of sorts on your own by using hidden menus. The critical missing piece though is that one can't merely overlay an existing "prod" component since joomla doesn't permit duplicate names although name isn't a primary key. So one is left with delete prod and rename sandbox but then you will be left with disconnected pieces since the component ID is the key within the database - sandbox key won't match old prod key.

CMS is a design/build on the fly thing meant for non-techies but to make any meaningful site-wide changes, you need deep knowledge of all the layers involved. It keeps a lot of techies busy and I hear that it pays quite well too.

Mike, there is a difference between the changes we make, and a full release upgrade of the underlying framework and plug-ins.

enough is enough...
my site has gone down 3 times in 11 days: 5/1, 5/7 and now, 5/11.
But, there's no way to tell unless someone reports it to our office or I check on it.
This is becoming embarrassing and is unacceptable.

Down, no. But my site went through the "upgrade" over the weekend. Was broken for hours. Joel's excuse was that it had not been turned over to me. So live upgrade.
As of now, I still can't use the dor v'dor template, so my custom background is gone. I'm back to the v1.1 reflex template. I'm just fed up with this. I'm seriously thinking of re-creating my site somewhere else with my own template. So far, this whole URJ experience has been very disappointing to me. They simply do not seem to give a crap.

Applying any untested changes to a live, production system is contrary to the most basic concepts that students are taught. I will agree that not having a dev instance in which to test is dangerous. They could upgrade in dev, allow us to test it and have us give approval BEFORE going live. The current approach is amateurish at best.
Now, I hear that the reason my site crashes is because I'm still under v2.5. v2.5 hasn't caused problems in years so why is it now a problem all of a sudden?
If there's an issue, I want to hear a valid cause not some fluff. That's what I will not tolerate.

I'm going to send a short, respectful email up the chain at URJ about upgrade issues. If you want to be included in the email, please add your email address below.
Thanks

Mike,

Please include me. webmaster@templeharzion.com

Thanks, you'll be cc-d on it.
technology@templeadasshalom.org

Yep, our site was down again today for the second time in about a week. Same reason: mySQL database either unavailable or corrupted (I don't know which).