Website Offline, No Cached Version Available

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WrongPlanet has been down for over an hour now. I kept getting the message below. Even if I clicked the link to "retry a live version" I got the same message. Finally closed my (Firefox) browser and opened it again and was able to log in again. What is going on? I shouldn't have to close/reopen the browser to get this site to work again.

I have gotten it twice now. I wonder if it's an early April Fools joke and now that it's today, Will it be fixed after today?

We had a network issue earlier that affected our ability to reach some parts of the Internet. This is likely what you saw.

After that post WP became unavailable again. I've only just been able to access it again now. Downtime around 2.5 hours.

Hah! Back online again now. I've just sent you (Sliqua) an email via your own site. WP has effectively been unusable for the last three hours, same error message.

I still cannot access the site from my Android phone, but my laptop gets it just fine.

This problem keeps occuring.

Back online this morning. WP was down for over six hours yesterday evening and still down when I went to bed. It would be nice to know what happened? Presumably the downtime was restricted to members in specific geographic locations?

@Sliqua, shoot the messenger eh? I guess if the site goes down in future (for some members only) then I just ignore the problem and hope you know about it with your extra sensory perception and fix it.

Oh crap! I can't post this now - same message about the site being offline! Grrrr! I'm obviously pissing in the wind here. Retrying... retrying... retrying...

I'll just add, don't know if this helps... On one occasion yesterday evening it did display a cached page for the Random Discussion Forum (with a comment at the head of the page saying it was a cached page due to the site being offline) but interestingly the most recent post on that page was March 22. i.e. over a week old! That just doesn't sound right. Why was the cached page so far out of date anyway? Is something not synchronising properly?

...and just once, I had a message saying "Always Online", telling me that the server was in "Offline Mode" (that used to be called "down" when I was in IT ) and invited me to click on a link to view the site from a cache.

Yay, I thought - it's working!

Nope: the next screen was the usual "Website Offline, No Cached Version Available" error.
So it's cached yet not cached. That's neat.
Checking with that other technique sliqua-jcooter mentioned showed that the site was up and functioning anyway so the whole thing was bogus.

TallyMan, I've had that a couple of times: the orange banner across the screen top. IIRC it was also a stale message that was returned - I was just clicking through old postings to see if anything was cached, during one error session, and that came up for a few posts. It was hit and miss though: most just returned the "No cached version" error.

Today, within a minute or so of starting, I got the "No cached version" errors and the assorted hoop-dancing required to sidestep this is, to put it lightly, extremely frustrating.

I really think an urgent decision needs to be made as to whether there is any point in continuing with CloudFlare.
A quick Google search shows similar "no cached version" problems occurring with other sites using CloudFlare, and the most often quoted reason is that something (on the hosting site) is blocking CloudFlare's IPs - but I'm sure that would have been checked already, right?
https://www.cloudflare.com/ips
I don't see much by way of "yes, that fixed it" so perhaps that's all bogus too?

I just noticed something else. If I open WP using Sliqua's alternate technique then click 'log in' in the top right corner it brings up the error message about the site being offline with no cache. But if I click Community > Discussion Forums then click 'log in' it works and allows me in. Presumably because it retains the alternate URL rather than switching to the URL of the CloudFlare version. This indicates the problem is with CloudFlare not directly with WP itself.

I wonder how many other members are experiencing the same problems but aren't reporting it, or don't know how to report it and are just hoping the problem goes away? Since it appears to have hit several IT literate moderators (based on the discussion in our forum) it would imply that lots of other members are being hit? It took me over an hour to get briefly online yesterday evening to create this thread, then the site went down again with only a few minutes of uptime over the following six hours or more.

I had to clear cookies and that using my phone. Only managed to come on just now. Really disliking this CloudFlare... It's so misleading with the always online thing when the site is offline.