Yesterday, on April 3, 2021, Drillimation’s usual activity came to a temporary halt after their servers were hit by a major outage. The outage began at 7AM EDT and service was down for over three hours, delaying certain actions such as Drillimation’s social media liking activity, which almost got halted for that day. It’s currently unknown what may have caused the outage, but the main cause was an invalid IP configuration.
Wi-Fi at Mercyhurst University, where Drillimation Systems operates, has frequently been criticized for instability. The network’s acceptable use policy states that IT reserves the right to disconnect the network at any time for maintenance or repairs. The network is also extremely difficult to connect to; users must have a email account associated with the university in order to connect, and their network policies appear to be using a modified version of SecuROM, requiring users to register their devices and must be reactivated once every six months, and there is a limit on how many devices can be connected. Problems with connecting consoles also persist too; there are reports of Nintendo Switch devices registering a NAT type of D, and the IT department has been working to resolve that issue. Although unheard of, the log on prompt can be bypassed using a VPN, which is what I have.
For the duration of the outage, Drillimation used a mobile hotspot as a backup. However, some actions such as watching videos and browsing social media had to be put aside in order to conserve data. Unfortunately, this has happened before. Almost two years ago, Drillimation was hit by a similar outage that lasted through an entire night, even though our Prophet was sleeping during the outage.
We apologize to anyone for the inconvenience.
Drillimation Systems 