Dropbox appears to be having significant issues as users have experienced slow speeds and/or inability to access their files for at least 9 hours. Some users claim the site has been slow since Monday morning.
This morning, Dropbox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi posted in the Dropbox forum,
“hi all,
we’re experiencing heavy load which is resulting in intermittent slowness/downtime. in some cases there’ll be a delay when syncing files through the desktop client but the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two. we had a similar issue yesterday and the team is hard at work on a solution.
we’re very sorry for the inconvenience and will provide updates as we learn more”
The team also tweeted about the issue:
hi all, we’re having intermittent downtime and working hard on fixing things up. sorry for the inconvenience forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=6…
— Dropbox (@DropboxOps) August 21, 2012
Users have been posting in significant numbers about the issues they’ve been seeing, some saying they cannot access their accounts at all and countering Dropbox’s time frames:
“the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two” um, no. The delays have been much much longer than a minute or two, 10-15min to upload a single 0k text file. I currently have 2 tiny files that have been “stuck” for well over 30 minutes. –member Clint W.
I can understand network problems, everybody faces it someday, and work hard to solve it. What I can NOT understand is lack of communication. I checked your twitter users @dropbox and @dropboxops, and thought the problem was on my side. I lost many hours checking configurations. Then I remembered the forum and came here for help. Big surprise, was not my problem, but everybody’s problem. One tweet when the problem begun, and I could had spent those hours playing with my son. Come on, guys, we know you could have problems, but TELL US quickly! I’m a paying customer who now wonders if should set a Google Drive account as a contingency. We both lose. –pro user Alex P.
Seriously guys, you can’t expect everything to always be working even if you paid for it. Its not like Dropbox is down for a week, so take it easy. They are human and they are doing there best to bring everything back up. –pro user Faisal A.
Being in the business I can tell you this is no small glich. You dont go into the storage business let alone a cloud storage business without a serious architecture. Massive redundancy across the board; storage, circuits, etc. No one should try to down play and state “You cant expect is to work all the time” thats just B.S. with the amount of redundance involved and DR that should be tested on a on going bases…–member u70143446
About three hours ago, some users posted that things were working again for them. But it appears as though the solution didn’t last.
Pro user Eric G. claims a moderator deleted his post on the forum to draw media attention to the matter:
@Mark Why did you delete my post about to inform Techcrunch and Mashable ????
Users have seen different responses from Dropbox about the issue:
Two different explanations from Dropbox. The one Andy posted saying the desktop clients are being throttled due to maintenance, and the one I got 23 minutes before that saying they are looking into the cause of the problem:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Teams Support [email protected]
Date: Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:33 PM PDT
Subject: RE: Dropbox for Teams Syncing is SlowHi Kip,
We are seeing some slowness across our network at the moment. Our engineers are looking in to the cause of the issue but it sounds like they will get ti resolved this afternoon.
Sorry for the delays in your syncs. –member Kip
And this response:
I’ve reached out to Dropbox for comment and I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks to the tipster who pointed out that we cover Twitter and similar outages within minutes, but were very slow to this one. You’re right. But better late than never, which I’m guessing is the Dropbox motto right now.
Update: Dropboxer Joe G. posted on the forum:
Hi all,
Update on the slowness/syncing issues from the last few days.
We’ve been having some performance issues with our backend databases. In order to keep everything running we had to throttle syncing during our peak usage hours. This caused long delays in client syncing and intermittent web issues.
We understand this makes for a terrible user experience and we deeply regret the impact it’s caused.
We’ve removed the throttle and at this time everything should be running at full speed.
Tonight we’re making some changes to improve the backend and expect it to alleviate the issues.
From the posts in the forum, comments below and Twitter, it looks like Dropbox is back up to running at full speed for many users.
- DROPBOX
Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a…
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