Hi Everyone,

As many of you may have noticed, yesterday we had problems with the responsiveness of the site. Firstly I’d like to apologies to anyone who had a bad experience on the site yesterday. Secondly I can let you all know that we tracked down the problem and it’s now been fixed.

As is ever the case with such issues, two unrelated events combined to cause the problems. The first issue was an internal firewall issue. The second was when our data centre in New York experienced an effective slasdotting when some content on the Nature site pulled in a lot of traffic. The interaction of the two caused the impact on the Nature Network site.

Usually either issue on it’s own would not have been a problem. The delay in the fix was due to the unusual nature of the problem, but we have it figured out now and this sort of thing should not be a problem in the future.

All the best,

- Ian