A lot of you were likely aware that the website was down for a couple days and may be looking for answers to what happened.

There’s a lot of backend mumbo-jumbo that could be explained, but the simplest form of what happened boils down to a memory leak.

If you’re not familiar with what a memory leak is, rest assured first and foremost, that this doesn’t effect any data and how its handled on the website.

A memory leak can occur when operations and services “runaway” on a website, overwhelming its server causing it to have a memory leak. This leak will let little bits of data, typically empty packets run and accumulate on a server, until that server reaches its capacity. Once this happens, a server can begin to experience hang ups, interrupted services, broken pages and content, etc. The timing may vary for servers, but these memory leaks will eventually cause a server to crash completely in a way that may indicate a misconfiguration on the server, rather than service disruption. Because of this, we had error messages popping up indicating a 502 bad gateway error like many of you saw, or a webmaster error.

There’s a lot of backend jargon that goes into breaking this down, so rather than bore everyone with all the exact details, here’s a short summary of things that may you, the reader, may find noteworthy.

In this day and age, we understand that anything with the word “leak” in it can be very scary to hear when it comes from a website you frequent. We want to reiterate that no customer details or information was impacted in any capacity. We had an oversight in our backend development that lead our server being overwhelmed that forced our website offline.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out!