Community Corner

GoDaddy Hiccup Takes Out Madison Shuttle's Website

With a few days remaining for people to try the shuttle for free, Madison Avenue Direct's site was one of millions affected by a network error that made national headlines.

The president of the nonprofit transportation management association that operates the Madison Avenue Direct shuttle connecting Drew, FDU and the College of St. Elizabeth to downtown Madison said the shuttle's website stopped working amid problems with its Web host, GoDaddy.

The issues made headlines and affected several million websites.

GoDaddy's interim chief executive told the New York Times internal network errors took millions of websites offline starting Tuesday. The company said Tuesday night most of the websites were restored, though www.madavedirect.com still was down Wednesday afternoon. It was restored by Wednesday night.

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TransOptions posted a message about the situation on its Facebook page with a link to a PDF of the schedule hosted on the agency's main website:

Unfortunately the Madison Avenue Direct website is down following the troubles with GoDaddy that you may have seen in the news lately. If you're looking for the schedule, you can still find that on our website: http://www.transoptions.org/_media/commuters/pdfs/madison_avenue_direct_schedule_2012.pdf

Find out what's happening in Madisonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

TransOptions President John F. Ciaffone said they hoped to have the website restored quickly because many of the college students who would use the shuttle get their information online.

"It's important they have access to the information they need to properly use the service that's provieded," he said.

The Madison Avenue Direct shuttle is in its second year and is nearing the end of .

While the website downtime was temporary, Ciaffone said TransOptions is hopeful the shuttle, which brings students to the train station and stores and restaurants downtown, will continue for years to come.

"It's good for businesspeople, gets cars off the road, gets more people on transit," he said. "It's a win-win every way you look at it."

Updated with information saying the website was restored.


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