Technical gremlins
Hello everyone,
As many of you will have noticed, we were struck by severe technical problems today, .
It happens to the best of them, unfortunately - websites do go down and whilst our technical experts worked feverishly to fix things, we weren't able to keep you updated in all the ways you would normally expect us to for the first hour or so of play today.
So let us first apologise for that, and rest assured that we are looking into what went wrong and also reviewing our procedures for what we do when this happens.
But you, the audience, are always the priority so we did try everything we could to get updates from Old Trafford to you somehow.
Our main publishing system was down (it's the system we share with our colleagues in which is why they were also unable to bring you breaking news this morning) but we do have other systems - this blog is written in one of them, and our runs off another.
So we decided to publish Tom Fordyce's live text commentary (which eventually was put back in its ) in 606.
But the problem then is - who even knows it's there? People would have gone to or to find updates and the piece Tom was writing in 606 wouldn't have been there.
Our ticker was still working - that's the constantly scrolling text you get just underneath the top story on our front page - so we linked that to Tom's updates in 606. And also to , because our automated statistics run off another system again, and thankfully that was still working too.
But we can't rely on everyone seeing the ticker, so we also tried to update the headline cricket link on our front page manually using a back-up emergency system.
We were able to update Ceefax and Digital Text - you've guessed it, another system again - and the scores on mobile phones were working. But not the feed of Tom's live text updates, so sorry again anyone who was out and about this morning and hoping to read those on your phone.
And we have replied to each of you who complained this morning with an explanation.
But in the meantime, thank you for your patience and hopefully all is back to normal now.
Regards to all,
