Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline
There was a meltdown at bookmark sharing website Ma.gnolia Friday morning. The service lost both its primary store of user data, as well as its backup. The site has been taken offline while the team tries to reconstruct its databases, though some users may never see their stored bookmarks again.
The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can't say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users' data. It also says the data failure was so extensive, repairing the loss will take "days, not hours."
In light of today's outage, many are questioning the reliability of web apps and web-based storage in general. Twitter in particular is full of users venting their suspicions.
Ma.gnolia posted a short note on its website shortly after 9 a.m. Pacific time, saying it was down temporarily due to a database failure. Later Friday morning, company founder Larry Halff issued an apology on the homepage along with the following note:
Ma.gnolia experienced every web service's worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members' bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.
