On Saturday, March 21, 2015, starting at 10:00am CDT, the Globus service will undergo a significant upgrade. We will be making changes to the underlying services used for managing user identities and groups. While we are deploying these changes into our production environment, the Globus service will not be available. We expect that the upgrade will be completed within 4 hours, and the service should be fully operational by approximately 2pm CDT.
During the upgrade window, all active file transfers will be suspended, and they will resume when the Globus service is restored. The result will be slightly delayed completion of these transfers, but there should be no impact to user data as a result of this upgrade. Users attempting to access the service at www.globus.org (or via an institution's branded Globus web site) will see a maintenance page. Among other things, no new user sign-ups will be possible; applications that use Globus services for identity management will not be able to provision new user accounts during this period; and applications that use Globus for authentication will not be able to obtain authentication tokens.
We will use the Globus status Twitter feed to provide regular progress updates and information on any schedule changes or issues we encounter. We encourage all Globus endpoint administrators to follow the Twitter feed both for notifications during this upgrade as well as for future service status updates. We will also post a notification on our blog when the upgrade has completed successfully.
This is the first time since the Globus service was launched in late 2010 that we've had any scheduled downtime. The service is upgraded routinely—typically every other week—transparent to our users, but the nature of this upgrade is such that we do not want to risk data loss or corruption, hence our decision to take the service down for a short period of time.
We apologize for any inconvenience the interruption may cause. Please contact us at support@globus.org if you have any concerns about the potential impact of this upgrade.