Signups for Equity principal auditions are being rescheduled after a website outage prevented actors from signing up Wednesday.
The public-facing Equity website and its member portal crashed Wednesday after the website’s servers, stored in Equity’s Chicago office, failed as an indirect result of the “extreme cold.” The site was restored mid-day Wednesday.
Because of the outage, the online sign-ups that were meant to happen at noon Wednesday have been rescheduled to 4 p.m. Thursday. Sign-ups for auditions on Thursday will proceed at noon, as usual.
Online sign-ups allow Equity actors to reserve a time for an audition, rather than showing up in-person in the hopes of getting a time. Slots for principal auditions typically open up at noon on a daily basis.
According to Equity, an HVAC unit in its Chicago office failed due to the cold weather, causing temperatures in the server room to reach more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to the high heat in the room, the servers automatically shut down.
The Chicago office itself was closed due to temperatures that fell to a low of -23 degrees Fahrenheit Wednesday, with wind chills of -49 degrees Fahrenheit.
