For those who don't read lj_maintenance entry edits

[winter]

*facepalms* So, from the horse's mouth. Remember that Snowflake Cookie free v-gift that everyone was sending around?

It's what broke notifications, because there's a default setting of ON for "get notified when one of your friends receives a virtual gift". The Snowflake got made available free to everyone by a glitch (*cough* there's a reason I was sending them around last year at St Nick's) and suddenly everyone and their dog was sending it to people. Which generated notifications to the f-lists of people who got them. Lots of notifications. The sending system hid under the bed and refused to come out.

Notifs are getting processed now, but they're also still building up. At the height of it, the number reached 12 million ~_~ Ops are on it and have managed to kickstart the sending, but it might take a while for all of them to clear up.

So Now You Know.

Comments

[alice_montrose]

Bwhahahahaha! I knew it! The snowflakes broke LJ! *very much amused*

What's funny is that I was getting v-gifts notifications, but not comment notifications. ^^;;;;

[valancystar.livejournal.com]

Me too, which was extremely irritating, because I don't care who gets a snowflake and I should have the option turned off, and I do care about getting my comment notifications.

[winter]

It's one of those backend things - all notifications go through the same pipe, so all v-gift ones had to be delivered before the comment ones could go through ~_~

[winter]

This was because the comment notifications were queued up behind the v-gift notifications ~_~ The more annoying thing was that important mails (rename tokens, validation for new mail accounts, password resets) got queued up too.

[alice_montrose]

Yeah, their explanation was pretty clear about that. The good part is, I'm getting notifications for comments left last night this morning, which is progress from where I'm standing. *nod nod*

With, me, the issue was I had almost missed out on an important message someone left on an older entry. Luckily I checked manually after seeing comments pop up on the drabbles, but not in my inbox.

[winter]

PMs were also affected, and it took me a while to sort out tomorrow's lunch appointment with astarise ^^;

And I just got the notif for your comment, not even an hour's delay. Success!

[alice_montrose]

Yeah, they're coming in faster! Whoot!

I switched to plain old email use instead of PMs for the past two days. What do you know, that still works! XD