Servers are Down

[ShinChuck]

Seems like they're officially down. Thoughts and prayers go out to the Japanese people. Glad to see Square Enix doing their part to facilitate recovery!

[Punxsutawney]

Yep these natural disaster are terrible. I hope Japan, the Japanese people, and the Japanese economy the best of luck and a speedy recovery.

[AuctionGirl]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

[Hero]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it because the servers are only in Japan?

[mimeh]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it because the servers are only in Japan?

You are right. It's a japanese game, made by japanese people and with japanese servers. Taking into account that they have an extimated death toll of more than 10000 people, I think their main priority is not that we can play in the rest of the world while their people is dying.

[AuctionGirl]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

Maybe they will learn from this experience as this shutting off the service could cause more people to quit and find another game to play. Just poor business judgment from SE that's all..

[origamikitsune]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

Even if they owned their own data center out of country, that could easily place their monthly internet bill in the tens of millions to maintain a live-ready backup.

[Alise]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

Maybe they will learn from this experience as this shutting off the service could cause more people to quit and find another game to play. Just poor business judgment from SE that's all..

What is the point to have all the good manage and then suddenly a big disaster cost your life?
if no life, then is no point to have money, this time it was lucky their company doesn't get

The developers are all living in JP. Even thought they may be able to put extra server in another country for reserve purpose, they can not put their "extra" life in any other country for "reserve purpose"

[Abriael]

If I was a "Large Gaming Company" with over 10 million in monthly revenues between all services, I would have off site/off shore servers ready to go if a natural disaster happened. Yes this event is unfortunate, but business is business and they are unprepared to do business if a natural disaster occurred.

You don't get one bit of how servers of a MMORPG work right?

Even if they had a server farm already prepared somewhere (and it's no small feat considering that each "server" of the game is not a single server, but a server cluster made of multiple servers), even just the process of tranfering the data takes several days of preparation, and more days to be physically executed and finalized.

You sure didn't begin your adventure on this forum in a smart way.

[origamikitsune]

Why would SE not setup their service in another country not affected while they are affected in japan?

Short version, it takes weeks, if not months to plan that sort of change.

They have to purchase the servers, get them as close to their current servers in specs, re-program the game and all web-services to point to the new servers, and then they still have to transfer the data which in and of itself would take hours probably in order to do it without taking down already crowded data lines. MMOs are not small games. It is not like downloading an MP3 from iTunes.

Once all that is done, they have to test, debug, fix hardware, fix software, patch, test again, debug again, fix software, patch, test again, etc.

Right now, Tokyo is expecting mandatory rolling black outs, expecting to last up to three hours in some areas within the city. There is no way they would have had time to do it.

Edit: Also, assuming they were willing to use data centers owned by third party vendors at all, there aren't likely many data centers in the world outside of the corporate, government, or educational institutions that could handle that traffic. I can only think of a few.