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Hello, this is Oracle - we're not in right now

Forum hiatus

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The technical forums for Oracle's entire software and services catalogue - a support and collaboration resource for thousands worldwide - have been down for two-days.

Visitors to the database giant's forums, described by Oracle as containing 2.5 million messages about "every conceivable nuance of using Oracle products or supported standards", have been greeted with the message below.

Oracle Forums message

Our own attempts to sign up and also access Oracle forums failed. Callers to the numbers suggested will need plenty of patience, as they are filtered through a plethora of options.

Requests for clarification from Oracle on the cause of the outage and when the problem would be fixed went unanswered at the time of writing.

The apparent outage follows an upgrade on August 22 to version 5.5 of Jive Forums, billed as enterprise-class online community and collaboration software for companies to connect with employees, customers, and partners. Jive customers include the former BEA, now owned by Oracle, Intel, Nike and Netflix. There is a suspicion changes to the service have not gone as smoothly as Oracle would have liked.

In a final touch of Kafkaesque genius, Oracle has invited customers to report any known post-upgrade problems in the forum... to the forum itself. ®

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