Back-end problem?

About 1am tonight, maybe earlier, new object creation stopped working resulting in 'Unable to complete: Operation time out' or some such. (If the chat log is saved anywhere, I'd be happy to post the exact text.)

Adding to inventory was also disabled, and saves to the Journal notecard weren't taking. Otherwise the world was working

Yes this is a backend problem... one of the servers... I don't remember it's name, but it's a backend problem... It usually comes and goes about 5 to 15 minutes. I dosn't happen often anymore. (since 0.32)

Actually what you might have experienced last night was a new worm that was released. It infects MS-SQL servers, but the traffic it generates slowed the whole net down last night (and continues to do so now). Unless the SL people are actually USING MS-SQL for something they should probably block ports 1433 and 1434 as far out from their networks as possible (might even be able to get thrie upstream providers to do this).

About the same period of time I was just about unable to move around at all in SL. I finally gave up and did a bit of web browsing, but even THAT was hanging for minutes at a time.

Last I read they still estimate that around 30,000 servers are infected with this. It is also capable of exploiting a Cisco router bug to multiply the effectiveness of its search for new machines to infect.

This things nasty.

Here is a good place to get more info (if you can get through):

http://isc.incidents.org/

specifics:
http://isc.incidents.org/analysis.html?id=180

Sometime after we close the login, nightly scripts run to move a lot of data around the backend and thus not affected by the recent MSSQL worm making the rounds. Those processes will eventually be less burdonsome while users are online, but for now - we're closed at 1:00 am.