Thanks to an IM from Roenik Newell, I was made aware of this: SL appears to be down in a major way. When attempting to log in, the above message pops up.

Going to www.secondlife.com/status, however brings us: "The Second Life grid and the Second Life web site are open." And yet again, going to the Official Linden Blog gives this: "We are continuing to work on network issues that may be causing intermittent login delays. We will update as we work toward a solution. Thanks for your patience."

Mixed messages, LL! Anyone want to hazard a guess here?

Without so much as a word from other Lindens until now, Torley LInden has commented on an earlier entry from today with a blog post. In the blog, they acknowledge that there have been some inventory issues, including the complete newbie wipe I am suffering, while linking to my original post about the issue. They offer some likely scenarios related to inventory issues and the steps to report them. Comments are turned off, which is probably a wise move considering how angry and scared some of the residents are.

Known victims of the wipe at this time are moo Money (me), Jaxi Morrison, wife of SLProfiles creator Yo Brewster, Tatiana Vanguard, and Forseti Svarog, of the Electric Sheep Company. If you are a victim of the newbie inventory wipe, please post a comment here and I will add your name to the list.

According to this post on the Official Linden Blog, LL is having a little trouble getting through their backlog of Volunteer Applications. I don't know what the Volunteers would be doing for LL, exactly, but I imagine a Mobius Strip of Volunteers, all processing Volunteer Applications, with each Volunteer coming aboard just to be added to the Processing line.

LL employees are already overworked, but they're getting paid. And considering that with all of its ongoing networking issues, competition with other upcoming MMOs, continuing griefer attacks, etc., does working for LL still carry the same cachet as it might once have? Will Volunteers get Linden surnames? Is it possible to make a Mobius Strip in SL?

The Official Linden Blog has some interesting information about a new scam sweeping the metaverse. They have noticed that some residents have been spamming open chat with this:

"Hot new LINDEN HACK/CHEAT!! Will give anyone 1 month or older to the game 10,000 L$ FOR EVERY 30 MINUTES SPENT OFFLINE!!! hteeteepee:\\LindenHack.citymax.com\! Limited time hack! Register and start receiving now!"

This links to a website that will take your password and use it to take your money and turn your average avatar into an evil spam machine. Please take heed and protect your password at all costs. If you think your password is compromised CHANGE IT! When you are entering your password into websites make sure it is on the secondlife.com possibly on the lindenlab.com domain, but I have never experienced that. Its a relatively easy check and will save you heart ache in the long run. If you think you have already been a victim email support@lindenlab.com and CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD!

Citing the onslaught of new residents, yesterday Jeff Linden informed readers of the Official Linden Blog that the client download has now been moved over to Amazon.com's S3 system of servers. He mentions that this was done transparently, and that we will either notice no change, or improved download speeds.

Presumably, this means that downloading updates to the client will also be faster, though the post was vague on this point. Rolling through the reader comments, I noticed that someone had asked why LL hasn't moved over to Akami's servers instead, which was something I was wondering about myself. Akamai is fairly ubiquitous among the businesses of Silicon Valley, and have proven to be reliable and speedy.

Admittedly, a faster download time isn't something that's high on my list of fixes for SL, but every little thing helps.

Last night I was in-world visiting a friend's cool build (see my post later today). We had just finished the tour, when I thought I'd tp out to visit the Trivial Obsession game then in-progress. The blackout screen with its progress bar appeared, and then I was unceremoniously dumped right back from where I was leaving. The teleport had failed! What was going on?

Earlier, I had been experiencing numerous crashes, up to four within one half hour. I never did make it out of that sim, and finally logged off, feeling disgruntled. This morning, I see in my inbox the latest updates from the Official Linden Blog: "This evening around 6:15 PDT we experienced an outage with our central database server. It's not clear if this is related to other problems we had earlier in the day." It seems pretty clear that if that wasn't related, then it was about to marry into the family. The announcement goes on: "We have new code in the development pipeline that will help reduce our dependence on the central database, however, this code will not be ready to deploy until next week. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience. This has been a bad day for Second Life."

You know, while that might sound weasely to some, I have to admit that it's nice to know that LL does feel responsible for glitches like this, and commiserates to a certain exent. I'm always ready to extend the benefit of the doubt to this company, even though i hate it just as much as anyone when things like this happen. We wouldn't be so hard on LL if we didn't love SL so much!