On April 6th news of an outage at Atlassian that affected customers using Jira, Confluence and other products started to surface. The outage started the day before on the 5th and started rumors of everything from a ransomware attack to a potential breach. The rumors were quickly dispelled by Atlassian who stated that a routine maintenance script accidentally “disabled” a small number of customer sites. While their status page showed the status of affected products to be “active Incident”. The messages to customers indicated that restoration of sites would take “several days”, but now a week later there are still people reporting that their sites are still unavailable.

Twitter is an interesting company. On the one hand they act like they are a bastion of free speech and have stood up for the anonymity of some of the users. They have, in the past refused government interference in how their users post information and respond to tweets on their service. They claim to be against bullying and hate. At the same time, they have suspended accounts, removed tweets and permanently banned people for some very arbitrary reasons. They have stood their ground over this even when proven wrong about the original action. They have also left up tweets calling for violence by some while removing others, very confusing.

Twitter has been in the new a lot over the last few years. From deleting accounts of people and groups for very flimsy reasons to censoring posts that contain factual, but non-popular information. It seems that they just cannot help themselves when it comes to abusing community standards. The practice has even accelerated after Jack Dorsey left the company as CEO. The seemingly one-sided application of community standards has led to much criticism of the platform. The level of disappointment even led to Elon Musk buying 9.2% of the company and gaining a seat on the board of directors (not that this will accomplish much).

So, today is April 1st and with the net full of clever ideas to play a joke on readers it can be fun to sort through what is real and what is not. Because of this, we are going to take a day off to teak some confiigurations, maybe reload an system or two and just have some good bourbon in the process.

We will pick up our normal repoting tomorrow and will be throwing in some how-to's and explantions of different components, tools and more.

For any news letter subscribers, we are aware that our current system might not be sending them out properly and will be using this time to address that issue.

Thanks and have fun today!