The LTT forum is built on Invision Community (previously known as IPS and IPB), an off-the-shelf forum software. The majority of the code that powers the forum is theirs, and the technologies that we can use are largely constrained by what Invision Community supports.
The backend is written entirely in PHP, using a custom framework built specially for Invision Community. Some type annotations have been introduced into the codebase recently, but most of the code was written before PHP
Timeline of the outage: (times in UTC)
Starting at 02:03 on Saturday, requests started intermittently returning error 502, and many of the requests that were served successfully were significantly slower than normal
At 05:59, most of the services on the server crashed. All subsequent requests were served by Cloudflare with error code 502
At about 11:00, I came online and attempted to diagnose the problem. Due to the previous failures I was unable to access the server, so al
