Server woes

Hi Blipsters, Joe here.

As you many of you will have noticed, Blipfoto experienced some major problems between 8pm and midnight UK time yesterday - the site was slow and at times completely unreachable. On behalf of all of us here at Blipcentral, I'd like to apologise for the frustration caused and assure you we were all on hand doing everything in our power to resolve the situation.

When a website expands as fast as Blipfoto, there's a constant balance to be found between the growth in numbers and the technology we depend on to deliver the service. Sometimes that balance shifts in the wrong direction, and that's what happened to us last night.

A team of people have been working on this today, putting more resource in place to prevent the same thing happening again in the short term. Longer term, a plan is in place to roll out an increasing amount of capacity over the coming months.

We're confident everything will be OK as we get busier today, but we'll be keeping a very close eye on things. Please bear in mind we do publish updates on any technical issues on our Twitter feed - bookmark twitter.com/Blipfoto and pop over there for the latest if you're having trouble accessing the website or using the iPhone app. (You don't need a Twitter account to access the feed.)

Bottom line, we're all Blippers too, and this is at least as important to us as it is to you. Thanks for bearing with us.

Oh, and the picture? This is the camera I used to take the first ever Blip. While I was away in Boston last week, G very kindly had it encased in plastic to remind me where this crazy journey started. So I suppose in a roundabout way, you can blame this for last night's problems...