Degree Days.net Status Updates

This issue was resolved at 13:03 GMT. Apologies for any problems that it may have caused you.

It turned out that one of our API servers was having intermittent problems connecting to external systems (most importantly Weather Underground’s system). We haven’t yet figured out what exactly was going wrong but for the time being we have taken the problem server out of our cluster and replaced it with a new one. As the problems were intermittent, and the affected server was only one of several, hopefully the effects of this downtime were not too serious.

Our monitoring systems didn’t spot the issue as quickly as we would have liked because the problems were only affecting one of the servers in our cluster, and only some of the time. We will be looking into this further to see what we can do to reduce the chances of something similar happening again.

Update: this problem is now fixed. See here for more details or read on for a description of the original problem.

Since around 09:30 GMT today the API has been having some intermittent problems:

• Requests for stations for which we have detailed temperature data stored are sometimes taking much longer than usual to complete (on the website this may cause a timeout).
• For the stations for which we have detailed temperature data stored, the most recent data (last few days) might not always be available. If you’re waiting for recent data, we’d suggest trying again every few minutes until it appears (which should typically happen after a couple of attempts).
• Requests for the lower-quality stations for which we do not have detailed temperature data stored are sometimes failing (through the API you’ll get a ServiceTemporarilyDown failure), though those same requests may work just seconds later. You’re unlikely to be using these stations if you’re using the API, as they are never selected automatically by requests for data from geographic locations.

Apologies for this. We’re hoping that, as only a small proportion of requests are being affected, it won’t affect too many API customers or website users. But we’re looking into it right now and hoping to get it resolved as quickly as possible.

All appears to be working fine again since around 2011-12-31T14:10Z. Thank you WU for getting it fixed!

UPDATE: WU’s site is up again, and all has been working fine since around 2011-12-31T14:10Z.

http://www.wunderground.com/ is down, which is affecting some parts of our service.

The Degree Days.net API is working fine for airport stations and the higher-quality personal weather stations (for which we are using the Integration Method on detailed temperature data), although the very latest data (yesterday) is not yet available for many of the weather stations. Postal/zip code and longitude/latitude lookups are still working fine.

The lower quality personal weather stations (for which we are using the Enhanced Met Office Method for calculations) are not working, but very few API customers are using those (as requests for data from long/lat or postal-code geographic locations do not use those lower-quality stations).

On the Degree Days.net website, location searches (e.g. city name) are not working, but you can fetch data by weather station ID for the majority of useful stations (those described above for which the API is still working).

As soon as http://www.wunderground.com/ is working again, the affected parts of our service should start working again. At present we don’t know when that will be, but hopefully soon.