What the heck is going on with CougCenter?

Let's start here: We're as frustrated as you are about the problems all of SB Nation -- including CougCenter -- have been experiencing. I guess it's less of a big deal for us, since we're out of season at the moment, but it obviously still sucks.

So here's what we know: This is a server and network infrastructure issue, which (loosely translated) means that the SB Nation engineers are working to fix a problem that wasn't our doing. And when I saw "working to fix," I really mean "working around the clock without sleeping to fix."

Hopefully, this will be shored up by the end of the day. I've been with SB Nation since 2008, and I've never seen anything like this. What I know is that Vox Media (SB Nation's parent company) has some of the best people in the business working on this, and it'll be fixed soon. I'll update as updates come.

In the meantime, if you want to follow developments yourself, you can do that through SB Nation's status site and the SB Nation Support account on Twitter.

Ultimately, thanks for your patience. I've felt a little aimless over the last couple of days too!

UPDATE: Here's the official word from SB Nation. Head over to that thread if you'd like to leave a comment with them.

As SB Nation users, you have certainly noticed the significant performance drop across the network this week. The SB Nation team and all of Vox Media sincerely apologize for the site performance problems affecting your experience on our sites and communities over the past few days. We understand how frustrating it is for you. Given the nature of the issue, it is taking several days to fully restore performance completely. We have been working around the clock, taking incremental and comprehensive measures, to restore performance to normal levels.

Our approach to correcting the issues affecting the network has been two pronged: 1) improve performance as much as possible incrementally and 2) restore long-term stability to the system.

The first prong has been focused on improving the performance of logged-in users as these users have experienced the biggest drop in performance. Some of the improvements that we have pushed out to this point include:

Page load performance for logged-in users, including lower error rates

Commenting performance

Logging-in

Publishing content, including Fanposts and Fanshots

Some of these errors, specifically for logged-in users, may appear intermittently until we complete the necessary infrastructure work, but performance should be greatly improved from Tuesday evening and Wednesday.

We have all hands on deck to complete this work and will be performing maintenance after hours this weekend to restore full service to the network. Of course, we would like to do this work sooner, but we need to be extra careful and thorough in making these changes, so as to not risk new problems.

Again, we completely understand the frustration our users have felt over the past few days and will continue to do everything in our power to restore full service to the network and ease your frustration. We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding as we've worked through these issues and bring long term stability to the network. Thank you for your dedication to and support of SB Nation and Vox Media.