i got up this morning and checked my feeds, ready to read this morning's "behind closed doors" column, when i got a nasty surprise:


either somebody really screwed up, or somebody really screwed up. i'm now unable to view any news stories on the site without a username and password. even going to the front page of indystar.com brings up the login box, and as you can see, the website can't even pull its own headlines because of permission problems.

there are two possibilities here:

1. gannett has decided to charge for the website.
2. someone on the IT team made a massive error, rendering the entire site essentially unusable.

one can only hope that it's option 2, because i can't imagine many people wanting to pay to visit a news site where they can't even check the headlines for typos.

oh well. now we wait. hopefully the site will be fixed by end of day. if not, i guess i'll be getting my news elsewhere.

update: as of approximately 10:45 a.m., the problem appears to be fixed. the site was inaccessible for at least 2–3 hours.

2nd update: IndyStar.com access problems corrected

IndyStar.com is now fully restored after this morning’s two-hour outage caused by two brief power losses to some circuits feeding the servers, according to the company that maintains the Web site.

The wide-spread problem caused other Gannett Web sites, mainly in the eastern United States, to be inaccessible as well.¶

Considering this error has been going on for over two hours now (@10:18am) it shows the Gannett system is so disorganized that a massive failure like this could persist so long. Somebody "flipped a switch" in the server software and a competent software jockey could fix it rapidly.

It's truly amazing how incompetent Gannett management has become... ¶