Current status: HTLAL is currently online.
See also: Is HTLAL down again? (thread), HTLAL Problems
Background[]
Sometimes, without warning, HTLAL goes down. Since the site's administrator almost always isn't aware, he often has to be tracked down and told about the outage. Then, also without warning, the site suddenly comes back up again. The outage can last for days or weeks and no one ever knows why because the administrator never communicates the reason for the outage or keeps the community informed.
This page covers only major outages - those that last 12 hours or more.
Before 2015[]
2012: The spam/malware attack, around July 31st. Spammers had exploited a vulnerability and FX needed to find and fix it. This resulted in about a week of unavailability and one day of lost posts. The community started a couple of temporary forums for the first time.
On August 6, FX (administrator) posted what remains his latest message on the site, "test".
The TAC challenge led to yearly peaks in 2010-2015; however, other activity has been steadily declining since 2012.
In the aftermath, it was discovered that HTLAL's rankings in Google had suffered.
2014: The DNS crisis that required people to edit the "hosts" file or wait. (Later those who forgot to revert the change faced further problems.) Benny Lewis offered to host HTLAL on his "Fluent in 3 months" forum.
2015[]
In 2015 the situation arguably became critical.
The week that never was: a maintenance warning was displayed in late February-early March (possibly 26.02-04.03 - exact dates unconfirmed). The forum might have been moved to a different server, by the administrator or the hosting company. Due to a lack of information, people continued using the forum, and a week of posts was lost.
At the same time it was discovered that the domain was to expire on July 16.
Since the need for off-HTLAL communication became evident, Twitter and Facebook pages were started. This wikia's front page has also been used for announcements ever since. A placeholder forum was started by rdearman. Members showed increasing frustration and/or anxiety about the forum future.
"Day X" seemed to pass normally, but after a grace period of 1-2 days, the domain was unavailable on Saturday, July 18, a little before noon GMT.
After various attempts, emk was able to get in touch with FX's co-worker or business partner the following Monday, and on Tuesday, July 21, HTLAL was available again.
Nevertheless, there was still no communication going on, resulting in a deadline and a statement from the moderators.
There was another outage from August 25 to 27, with no known reason. It concerned FX's other sites too. (Further outages that affected his other sites are marked in bold)
2016[]
Starting from 2016, the info is less precise due to the low level of activity. It's not known when each outage began exactly, possibly hours before being noticed for the first time.
A major unexplained outage happened on 15-16 November, leading to 17+ hours of known downtime.
Prior to that there was a shorter outage on November 1st, with known downtime of 20 minutes.
2017[]
HTLAL was down at least between August 23 and 28, status on August 22 unknown. It followed a pattern similar to the recent major outages. Even the dates were similar to those of 2015. Cause unconfirmed, possibly an expiration of the hosting.
2019[]
Two outages in quick succession, from June 13 or 14 to June 17, and from June 22 to June 27. Cause unknown.