The login screen for second life is broken at the moment. It looks like this on the right. No word from Linden lab just yet, but the cause is the squid proxies that are used to take the load off backend services (they're running in reverse-proxy mode for all you cache-coherence geeks out there).

Looks like a simple misconfiguration that's preventing the edge servers from pulling data.

What? English? Basically the web-servers that provide this too you are actually fronting for and caching data from an internal service. Which they are presently unable to talk to. It's no biggie, and won't stop you getting into SL. No need for panic. When the right monkey gets to it, it should be a ten minute fix.

[UPDATE: 8:30am - Cyn Linden acknowledges the issue here, sans the technical info.]
[UPDATE: This was resolved later in the day. Cyn didn't provide a timestamp, however, so we can't say when.]

The Second Life grid might not really be offline, but how would you know, if you rely on the Second Life status page? At the time of writing it has been displaying the following message for (as near as we can tell) over two weeks:

Second Life Offline for Database Maintenance or Update

In our continuing effort to improve your Second Life experience, we have taken Second Life temporarily offline for maintenance. This may also effect portions of our website. We are working to re-open our doors as quickly as possible and we appreciate your continued patience. For more details and further information on our system status, please visit our official blog at: blog.secondlife.com.

Any sort of facelift to the log-in screen is a welcome one, though the new one we got is a far cry from what I've read people suggesting. There's no animation, no buildings, no avatars, just a landscape, though now we get stats and news from LL's blog. This is all well and good as far as it goes. However, in the upper right-hand corner, we also get some stats that kind of made me cringe just a little: Total Residents, Logged in Last 60 Days, and Online Now.

There's a large disparity between those three measurements, and it's very telling ... of what exactly, I'm not sure, but it doesn't look terribly good when only half the number of the over one million residents registered have logged in over the past two months. Over the past few days, I've also noticed that the residents online at any given time are a small fraction of the total number as well.

I'm sure this has always been the case to a certain degree, and any oldbie will be able to tell you stories about the Good Old Days (you know, 2003), but with all the extra attention SL's been getting, it sure doesn't seem like we're keeping many of the people who create an account to check out what SL's like. Will this trend continue? Will we see over 2 million registered users in a year's time (or sooner) and only 1/4 of those Online Now?