Network re-routing

[Ian]

Apologies if there appear to be some connection problems with the site today, but the backend to the server network is being reconfigured today and may result in some temporary problems:

During this 8-hour maintenance window there will be traffic re-routing across different parts of our backbone, different ISPs etc. Due to those traffic moves, there may be changes to customer end-to-end latency for public and private traffic. Additionally, there is a remote risk of temporary packet loss or increased latency due to router switching fabric congestion during the duration of the maintenance.

This sort of changeover has been done in the past without any noticeable effect, however I've just had a couple of minutes where the site was inaccessible - so thought it was worth posting this heads up, although I don't think we'll see any more problems today.