[3:04 PM Pacific] All services have been restored. If you find yourself without group lookups or any of the other functionality in the second list below, please either clear your group cache (instructions are toward the bottom of this post) or relog to obtain full services.  Thanks!

[1:20 PM Pacific] Operations is re-enabling the first list of essential In World and Web services below.

The second list, part of our short-term mitigation strategy, will be returning to full functionality over the next 60 to 90 minutes. If that changes, we’ll let you know promptly.

Please be patient when logging in over the next few minutes. As is the case after any full restart, the login queues will be congested. Frustrating though this has been, please try to avoid the temptation to cancel and restart your login, and just ride the process out to keep your place in the queue.

[12:50 PM Pacific] In addition to the reduction of services outlined below, Operations will be immediately disabling the following services for at least 30 minutes:

• Logins
• Lindex
• In-world transactions
• Portions of Website functionality, including access to account pages and the support portal.

We’ll keep you updated every 30 minutes at most on this, and announce a return to service ASAP.

In order to increase overall stability of the grid today during peak usage hours, our operations team has disabled a set of in world functions to reduce overall database load and create a more reliable experience for everyone. As a side effect of these temporary changes, some group and avatar profile services will not be available.

Specifically:

• Avatar profile information will not be transmitted to the viewer. This affects both floating and embedded profile windows.
• General group information (name, charter, etc.) will not display
  in floating or group embedded group info windows.
• Groups will not show their member lists.
• Group owners and officers will not be able to eject group members.
• Group proposals will open the UI, but will fail to create.
• About Land will show 0 for traffic. (Note: This is temporary, and will not cause the loss of traffic captured throughout the time the total is unavailable to display.)

Please note that all of these effects are temporary and will return to normal behavior when we re-enable these services later today. At that time you should either relog or run Client -> Clear Group Cache (a Debug option) in order to refresh group behavior.

We will update this blog post to indicate when these services have actually been disabled, and again when they are again re-enabled.

As previously blogged, these steps are part of a temporary mitigation strategy until additional hardware can be installed, along with other scaling refinements planned for the very near future.

Thanks for your patience.