It’s been almost two weeks since the D7 upgrade deployment day. During all of that time we were heads down fixing follow up issues and working on stabilizing performance. Now is a good time to make a quick pause, and look back at how we actually survived the downtime!

Once we started the upgrade script, it quickly got boring to stare at the terminal. We were kind of curious what everyone else is doing, and thus an idea for #downtimestories was born.

It was a fun social media campaign, overall during the downtime people submitted more than 360 tweets with #downtimestories hastag. And oh boy, were they doing all kinds of different things.

Obviously lots of people were best friends with Google Cache that day. But not all of them!

Expense reports and other financial tasks were popular.

@drupal_org Doing expense reports actually :D #downtimestories

— Gábor Hojtsy (@gaborhojtsy) October 31, 2013

Some people were being nostalgic..

RT @timplunkett: @drupal_org pic.twitter.com/O025BoyjLj #downtimestories

— Drupal.org (@drupal_org) October 31, 2013

mean..

I'm plotting to re-write Drupal in Erlang while core devs aren't watching. #downtimestories

— Michael Prasuhn (@mikey_p) October 31, 2013

Since @drupal_org is down, I’m dressing up as Joomla for Halloween! #downtimestories

— Eric Johnson (@elstudio) November 1, 2013

productive..

@drupal_org Does compulsively refreshing https://t.co/Q1itrTn1k0 count as doing something? :) #downtimestories

— Francesco Placella (@plach__) October 31, 2013

learning new things..

@drupal_org I'm learning Drupal best practices, but can't quite get the hang of 'git add remote' #downtimestories pic.twitter.com/aF0eYojG67

— Erik the Web (@torgospizza) November 1, 2013

and of course getting ready for Halloween:

Ironing claws onto my sons Halloween costume! #downtimestories pic.twitter.com/30HzQhoHrS

— Brian Lewis (@ModsUnraveled) October 31, 2013

There even was an actual D7 upgrade launch party, with an actual CAKE:

Cake for the party is here. #downtimestories #drupal pic.twitter.com/YaoPiZEW2w

— Jibran Ijaz (@JibranIjaz) November 1, 2013

A lot of great stuff and hard choice. However last week we asked D7 upgrade team members to vote and they picked...

Feeding the chooks #downtimestories pic.twitter.com/TKHogsuYMG

— Phil Dodd (@phildoddau) November 1, 2013

Congratulations to Phil! A Drupal KeepCup and a Plush Ball are already on their way to Australia.

Thanks everyone for your tweets and pictures! We hope this little Twitter campaign added a little bit of fun to the whole sad business of website downtime.