[February 10th, 2022] What the Heck Happened?

[Brian Bauman]

Well, what a day it's been. First off, our apologies for the extended outage.

Early this morning, our session/caching server's data storage failed catastrophically. This prevented anyone from being able to log in to the website, and also caused a general slowness or unavailability as our caching was also severely hampered. Our session/caching server has been on our to-do list to be converted to a clustered, redundant setup for some time now, but unfortunately we're just not there yet.

We quickly provisioned a replacement and began restoring the session data from a backup made yesterday. Folks with good memories may recall that the last time we lost our session server, we didn't have a recent backup of the session data, and a cookie bug made it impossible for anyone to log in until they cleared their cookies, even after service was restored. Our backup procedures are much improved, however, and most users shouldn't even have to sign in again. These days we also have configuration automation, so the configuration process was much, much faster.

If anyone does run into weirdness with signing in, please try clearing all of your paizo.com cookies by following the instructions here.

As we continue to improve our stability and redundancy, these occurrences should be less and less frequent, and the recovery should be both faster and less noticeable. Again, our apologies for the inconvenience.

[Alex Speidel]

Thanks for the hard work you and the rest of the tech team put in today, Brian!

[redeux]

Thank you Brian and the tech team! All of you are heroes!

[GM Dennis]

And thanks for the explanation! That's a nice peak behind the curtain.

[mikem91]

Thanks for the hard work. Everything seems to be working AOK.

[gbonehead]

GM Dennis wrote:

And thanks for the explanation! That's a nice peak behind the curtain.

Agreed ... an explanation is a very welcome difference compared to other web sites :)

(aside: I did have to clear cached data for Paizo before I could log in ... I'm saying that primarily for anyone reading this thread :)

[Lathiira]

Everything's up and running. Thanks for the great communication as this went forward.

[John Napier 698]

Thank all of you for all your hard work.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

My Brian, what a day you've had! Thanks so much for getting everything patched together again.

Hmm

[Ravingdork]

Here may be found the words of Brian Bauman an Architect of Software: "He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Writ in the Forum of Aaargh."

[GM Abraham]

Sounds like a stressful day! Hope you and the rest of your team get some time to relax now.

[The Raven Black]

I could connect back without even relogin and with all my settings back, as if those hours were just a bad dream.

Thanks a lot, IT team.

[Cintra Bristol]

Thank you Brian and the IT Team! It was a joy this morning to see that you're back up and running. (I too was auto-connected with no login required - that's cool!)

And a big thank you also to the Customer Service team for (I assume) handling a load of extra tickets because of this. I put in a ticket yesterday just in case, and I really appreciated both their initial response and the "all clear" message waiting for me this morning.

Love you all!!!

[Qstor]

Thanks for your hard work!

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Hey Brian, we just found another issue. I can only see 5 SFS scenarios for sale in the store. You might want to check to see if anything is preventing all the scenarios from showing.

Hmm

[kaervek78]

Thank you!

[bearcatbd]

Seeing the same issue for PFS scenarios.

[roll4initiative]

Thank you, Brian, and the rest of the software team. I had no issues getting back in to my 4 PbP games.

[rhett baker]

There are still issues accessing parts of the site, including the Adventure Path order links.

[Yoshua]

Glad we can log in, but is anyone still having issues with the web store? Items not loading for example? When I hit the Pathfinder Battles pages the subscription items load but none of the sets load.

Thanks!

[Brian Bauman]

Thanks for the reports, folks. We found an additional knock-on effect from yesterday's outage and resolved that, too. Store items should now be displaying properly.

[GM West]

Thank you for the hard work! Lasted the better part of a day for me, but I was able to log in last night (was just too tired to post anything!) I figured you'd all set things right quick as always!

[Eldred the Grey]

Finally fixed it. Required clearing all my cookies, browser and pc and 2 patches to work but now we have liftoff.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

There is another issue with people being able to log in, but clearing cookies seems to fix it. Still, a bunch of the PBP GMs from the special had trouble logging in this evening.

[David knott 242]

I am now able to access this site in incognito mode (it didn't work last time or earlier in this event). I really don't want to clear my cookies if I can help it because of the negative effects for other sites that I frequent.

[SOLDIER-1st]

Most browsers allow you to clear just the cookies for a particular site.

[Dancing Wind]

David knott 242 wrote:

I am now able to access this site in incognito mode (it didn't work last time or earlier in this event). I really don't want to clear my cookies if I can help it because of the negative effects for other sites that I frequent.

What browser are you using? There are ways to clear the cookies for a single site if you dig into the settings.

[Cintra Bristol]

Dancing Wind wrote:

What browser are you using? There are ways to clear the cookies for a single site if you dig into the settings.

Thanks for posting that. I was having a recurrence of the "can't log in" issue all of a sudden, and I'd never realized clearing just one site was an option. Found it, and (obviously since I'm posting this) it fixed the issue.

[Aaron Shanks]

My weirdness with signing in yesterday was solved by clearing all of my paizo.com cookies by following the instructions above.

[The Raven Black]

Cintra Bristol wrote:

Dancing Wind wrote:

What browser are you using? There are ways to clear the cookies for a single site if you dig into the settings.

Thanks for posting that. I was having a recurrence of the "can't log in" issue all of a sudden, and I'd never realized clearing just one site was an option. Found it, and (obviously since I'm posting this) it fixed the issue.

Same here and the thread about deleting Paizo cookies was most helpful.

Come to think of it, maybe that thread should be stickied.

[Andostre]

The Raven Black wrote:

Same here and the thread about deleting Paizo cookies was most helpful.

Come to think of it, maybe that thread should be stickied.

It is!

[Andostre]

In case this is helpful to anyone:

On Chrome, I cleared my Paizo cookies as per the instructions in the first post, but I also had to clear cookies from a separate area. (I'm on a PC, not mobile.) If you click the small padlock icon in Chrome's URL bar, and then click "Cookies," there is a way to expand the cookies in use and an option to Remove them.

I had to do both to get things up and running for me on Chrome.

[GM Abraham]

I'm able to log on again on my desktop (using Chrome) but still not able to connect on my iphone or ipad (using mobile Safari). Is there any difference in the procedure for clearing the cookies on mobile devices or is it the same?

thanks.

[Oceanshieldwolf]

GM Abraham wrote:

I'm able to log on again on my desktop (using Chrome) but still not able to connect on my iphone or ipad (using mobile Safari). Is there any difference in the procedure for clearing the cookies on mobile devices or is it the same?

thanks.

After a lot of attempts on my iPad and giving up for a bunch of days and completely forgetting about Paizo I remembered how I used to be here all the time so tried to get back in. Still couldn’t. Finally worked it out - I went into Settings, selected the browser, and then in there Clear History and Website Data. That clears all the cookies.

[PCScipio]

Please note that The instructions to clear cookies on Chrome were not sufficient to resolve the issue for me (after several attempts).

When on the paizo website, I had to click on the padlock icon in the browser bar, which gave me the option to clear the cookies in use. Afterwards, I was able to log in without resorting to an Incognito window.

[Corbain]

I've been struggling with this for a couple of weeks using Chrome. I could log in using FireFox. Clearing cookies and cache didn't fix the problem. Eventually, I found a setting that block third party cookies in Incognito.

To get there select:
Three vertical dots (Customize and control Google Chrome menu)
Settings
Security and Privacy
Cookies and other site data

You can do one of two things:
1) Change the general setting to "Allow all cookies"

2) Scroll down to "Sites that can always use cookies"
Click "Add"
Enter [*.]paizo.com
Select "Including third-party cookies on this site
Click Add

This will probably work for any other sites when in Incognito. I think an update enabled this. So far Paizo is the only site I found impacted by this.