Linden Lab's Rob Linden has encouraged Second Life developers to bring forward issues with the proposed changes to login arrangements. Particularly he has invited a formal, group critique on the proposal "incorporating the salient points ... expanding on some of the earlier points ... and providing a list of questions that you'd most like addressed."

That critique is forming up on the Second Life wiki now. From monitoring the chatter on the development mailing list, I've yet to see anyone who is in favour of the proposed changes - and most tellingly most people seem to see the move as introducing an added level of security risk over and above what is present with the existing scheme.

Sabin Linden informs us that the login process for the viewer is going to change to address anti-fraud and other security issues. Essentially, you're not going to be logging in through the viewer anymore.

Instead, logins will be processed through the Second Life website, and the browser launched from there with a custom, secure token included in a secondlife:/// link. The token is valid for five minutes.

While the solution has been tested internally to function fine with Windows and Mac viewers, the Linux viewer solution still needs work.

We're getting numerous reports (and some direct experience, I might add) of multiple bouts of login problems with Second Life since approximately 4:30PM SLT (US Pacific). Some people are reporting it taking 20-30 minutes to get a response from the early part of the login phase, with the viewer bailing out with it's rather uninformative "Despite our best efforts..."

No word from Linden Lab on these issues yet so far. We'll keep you posted if we hear anything about them.

According to the blog logins have been down since 10:27 thanks to problems at a colocation facility. No news about when they might be up yet.

Apart from voice, which seems to be having a fair degree of teething issues, we've not had problems like this for a little while now, most unusual after a big version patch.

Although not officially blogged, people are reporting problems with uploading textures, saving scripts and the like - the asset server seems to be groaning too.

[UPDATE: logins still down, support and concierge numbers down too, as of 12:15]

[UPDATE 2] As of shortly after 4pm the grid is reported as returning to normal. People on the grid are still reporting missing regions etc. but they are starting to come back on line at a reasonable speed.

At approximately 3AM SLT today, most of the problems from yesterday returned in one form or another, according to reports. By 4AM there were an increasing number of reports of failed transactions, problems rezzing objects, unusually high packet-loss and failures to teleport. What you might think of as the usual suspects.

Linden Lab gave an update on the issues at 8:35AM, but issues have continued throughout the day without any announced resolution. That said the symptoms of the problems that people are having seem to be much milder than usual -- that is not to say that the effects are not severe, just that fewer people are experiencing them.

[Update: 8:45 AM 8 January - Linden Lab marks this issue as resolved]

Through the day today the routing issues, which began early this-morning, continue to be a problem. The inability for some servers to communicate with each-other is causing widespread teleport failures, slow object rezzing, issues with teleportation failures and stalled upload queues that are causing sims to choke and restart.

Linden Lab reports that they have been working on it as a priority item all day, and are continuing to try to stabilize as many regions as possible. It is not entirely clear whether this is an issue with the work done to the networks recently, or whether it is a new issue in Linden Lab's new communications backbone system. These issues are also reportedly affecting the Teen Grid.

All we can do at this stage is cross our fingers and hope that they can get it together.

[Update 4:41 SLT: Chadrick Linden reports that the problem has been found and fixed and that things will return to normal soon]

The Second Life grid is experiencing login and teleportation problems that apparently commenced sometime after 2am SLT. There's just enough detail in Chadrick Linden's post on the matter to point to routing problems between the two colocation facilities, citing that "During this time, a significant portion of the Second Life grid will not be able to be teleported to".

That would be consistent with the two colocation facilities being unable to communicate directly with each-other, even though Second Lifers can communicate (mostly) with either. Under the 1.9 (and later) communications model, simulators need to be able to interconnect between themselves to allow teleportation. Sloppy or impeded interconnect can also lead to login and a wide variety of presence issues.

[Update: 3:55AM SLT, this issue is reported to be resolved]