PLoS sites temporarily down – get your updates here.

We are back (2 pm PDT).  All our sites are humming along nicely.

As of early PDT Thursday morning (4/9/09) all PLoS Journal sites (except PLoS Biology) and the www.plos.org web site are temporarily down, due to circumstances beyond our control.  Many other web sites are down, from many other companies (i.e. this is not a PLoS specific problem).

Latest update is that the problem should be fixed around 6pm PST on 4/9/09. Meanwhile, you can visit PubMed Central to find individual articles.

Parts of Northern California experienced telecoms trauma overnight and rumors of main switch outages, fiber optic cables being cut and telephone coverage being suspended, abound. We hear that the fiber optic cable is the most likely culprit. We’re trying to figure out how long it might take for these big picture issues to get fixed (could be as little as one hour) and at the same time we’re planning on possibly providing another solution via Amazon EC2. Our IT team have been working on the situation since 4.00am.

All the sites that are co-located with United Layer (who are in the Bay Area) are affected, only PLoS Biology is not located with them and that’s responding very slowly but disabling the ad server may assist with that. We advise our users, fans and authors to visit PubMed Central in the meantime.

We’ll be using Twitter, this page, and everyONE to keep you updated. Plus, Bora will use A Blog Around the Clock for those of you who prefer that route.

Meanwhile, while you are here, please feel free to explore this site (everyONE,  the community oriented blog site for PLoS ONE) and we will resume normal service on our sites as soon as possible!