Website Loading Issue

[sleddriver]

Very odd problem recently occurred. The site in question is eevblog.com. It's an electronics forum. I was reading posts there and doing some searching w/o issue. Then a few days later I encounter this:
https://screenshots.firefox.com/AniRnOoIvRbEyNZ6/www.eevblog.com

DATABASE ERROR: IF YOU COME BACK TO THIS ERROR SCREEN, REPORT THE ERROR TO AN ADMIN.

I thought the site was doing late-night maintainence, so let it go. But a few days later I still can't access any forum threads. I can see the main page, then the forum page, but when I click on a thread link, I get the above error msg. I then held down SHFT while clicking on RELOAD to force it to reload from scratch. Didn't work. This machine is a Dell Optiplex W7 running FF56.

So I opened Opera on the same box, IT TOO has the same problem! So I switched to an Apple blackbook running OS_X-something and an old version of FF. It works fine there!

WTH is going on?
I've never seen this issue before!

 

[mk378]

The problem is at their end.

When you connect to a website, it almost always is running 3 pieces of software that interact.
The web server. This part is pretty much just pushing packets in and out without thinking about them much.
PHP. A PHP interpreter generates the web pages on the fly. PHP scripts hold the basic layout, but no text like the user posts.
MySQL. This database holds the content-- user posts, user account information, etc. and provides it to PHP.

Combined this is called the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache2 web server, MySQL, and PHP.

If PHP is not working you will see "Bad Gateway".
If MySQL is not working you will see something like "Database Error".

Usually these things are fixed within a few minutes by a quality control script or manual intervention.

 

[newtoncd8]

I was able to access forum threads at http://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php#c2 (I clicked on renewable energy and read a post from today).

 

[sleddriver]

Great explanation! I appreciate that.
Q: Why would it work with OS_X and not W7? Odd that as both OS's are running FF.