Recent outage

I goofed up, and I am sorry about that. My children placed me in a timeout until I made changes to prevent the goof from happening again.  Fortunately, I can report that I am out of the timeout and this issue will not resurface.  Unfortunately, there is one lasting side effect from this mistake that I cannot fix: the forecast for today (April 11, 2014) will only show worthwhile forecasts from about 5PM Eastern time going forward (forecasts prior to this are plain wrong). 

Now, you may be wondering what buffoonish thing I did.  Well, we use a cloud hosting service (Microsoft Azure) for our website that had a spending limit on it, which essentially means that if it costs more than $X/month, then turn things off. The idea was so that I did not get nailed with a ridiculous high bill that I could not afford. Additionally, when using the cloud, you pay for everything you use, and this month I pushed out and unusually large number of updates to the website significantly more than usual and I busted through my low spending limit and with only a day left in the billing cycle.  So Microsoft turned everything off (as they were supposed to).  Fortunately, a fix was pretty easy, I increased the spending limit considerably.

The increased limit immediately brought the website back up – but the process for pulling in forecast data does not turn back on automatically (not sure if there is a way I can make it do so). I completely forgot about this part, so the site had no data to give forecasts on (hence why the forecasts were all the same).  I’ve restarted this process and we have data again, but only from about 5PM EST forward.

In case you are wondering about all those updates, many of those were to support the next release of the Windows Phone app (coming soon) and starting the process of supporting forecasts outside of the US.

Thank you so much for your patience.