January 2017

Electrical shutdown at IC

To carry out electrical maintenance work, the whole site at Imperial College was shut down from midnight on Friday 6th January 2017 to 6am on Saturday 7th January 2017. During this period, OpenStreetMap switched to running entirely from Bytemark, which was able to cope with the extra load for that short period. We are looking into expanding our site at UCL to be able to handle more extensive or unexpected downtime. Issue.

TOTP-based tile rate limiting

In order to continue providing a good service for visitors to openstreetmap.org, the website now generates a TOTP token which can be verified by the tile caches. This can be used to make sure that priority goes to OSM contributors.

During the roll-out of this, there was a short outage on the website due to a configuration error. API functions served from cgimap were not affected, meaning not all users were affected. The outage lasted around 20 minutes.