Unlike the Tele/Torygraph when the IRA attacked Canary Wharf in 1992, Salut! Sunderland has no headquarters to bomb. It is the product of blokes who support Sunderland but live in true Mackem diaspora fashion in the south of France, on Merseyside and in Spain as well as in the North East.
But the impact of a wretched systems issue is there for all to see if they come to these pages today and remember what they looked liked on Thursday.
All we can say is “sorry – please bear with us”.
It started with the site going down yesterday, Friday, probably overnight (or “ovenright” in Monsieur Salut’s memorable typo) prompting Malcolm Dawson to ask: “Are you hinting that they are some sort of turkeys?”
At first we were told it was because of “emergency maintenance”, not that the servers ever tell us about non-emergency interruptions that shut the site down.
But the projected one or two hours to restore business as usual stretched throughout the day. We awoke this morning to what you see, a sparse and user-unfriendly design. Now the servers say it was a “site issue”, ie something going wrong behind our own scenes and the only way – they say – of getting us back up at all was to strip the site of its natural beauty.
Our own web guru, West Ham-supporting Sam, is doing what he can to put things right but warns it may be long fix.
Can we therefore beg readers to keep coming here, apply whatever understanding and sympathy they can and await whatever emerges from that fix?
We’ll be doing our best. But M Salut begins his annual return to the UK on Tuesday and will have only limited ability to do anything on site. Between us, we’ll manage as best we can the Sixer’s Sevens, Soapbox, Guess the Score (for the game vs Sam’s team) and Who are You?
Ha’w
ay the Lads half an hour from now.