The rumour mills (serious and highly humorous – the latter particularly on Twitter) churned mightily yesterday, Thursday April 26th, after SL log-ins were blocked. Users attempting to log-in to SL were treated to something of a dire message, rarely seen in recent years, prompting me to tweet at the time:

The outage certainly brought back memories for many, particularly of the old Black Wednesdays, when the Main grid would be down for anything up to eight hours (the rule of thumb being six) for weekly maintenance.

A Grid Status update posted on April 27th later revealed that the cause of the fault to be a core network upgrade going awry, impacting both the Main grid and the SL website at secondlife.com. The Grid Status update also warns of further maintenance work that will take place on Monday April 30th as a result of the issue. The update reads in full:

[UPDATED] Scheduled Maintenance Monday, April 30, 2012

[UPDATED 2:30pm PDT, 27 April 2012] On April 26, 2012, the Second Life engineering team was performing an upgrade to the core network. The upgrade triggered a bug that led to downtime and instability throughout the day. The maintenance described in this post is scheduled for Monday, April 30 at 6am PT in order to correct the bug and may result in additional service interruption. We apologize for the service disruption and appreciate everyone’s patience. [POSTED 1:00pm PDT, 27 April 2012] We will be performing scheduled maintenance Monday April 30, 2012 beginning at 6:00am until approximately 9:00am. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects or making inworld L$ transactions. Some residents may experience delays logging inworld. Please follow this blog for any updated information.