Been down for a couple hours for me.

  • Dave@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    4 days ago

    Their status page has an update on what happened.

    Service instability due to network incident Resolved - Due to an undocumented change in an operating system update shipped by one of our network equipment vendors, network devices in our Frankfurt datacenter experienced an unexpected partial failure.

    This incident impacted primarily Proton Mail, with approximately 50% of users who were routed to the impacted datacenter experiencing intermittent downtime for approximately 1 hour. Due to redundant systems, no data or emails were lost, but some email delivery may have been delayed.

    Incident report: Because the failure was partial, it was not sufficient to trigger a failover. Due to the unique circumstances surrounding this failure, a significant amount of confusion led to a longer than usual delay before the infrastructure engineers on shift made the call to failover to an alternative site.

    That restored services, with approximately 30 minutes of lingering low-level instability while load was rebalanced. Investigation that took place in parallel uncovered the undocumented operating system change in the network device update that was rolled out earlier this month. Impacted network devices were updated, and the Frankfurt datacenter brought back into production with no user impact. Proton routinely conducts testing before rolling out software patches to our network equipment and rolls them out gradually.

    Unfortunately, this problematic undocumented change was not discovered because it only created issues under specific load conditions (indeed, the new software had been running for weeks without issues).

    We apologize for the longer than usual incident response time. In the coming days, we will be analyzing our response to this incident to reduce future reaction times.

    • Mechanize@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      42
      ·
      5 days ago

      Yeah, incredibly frustrating.
      The only acknowledgement is from a volunteer mod on reddit that said an hour ago that “the team is aware and the status page will be updated shortly”.

      The fact I had to dig around to find that is really not a pleasing experience.

        • x00z@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          5 days ago

          Servers could still be up and responding to pings, yet backend databases could be down.

          Or it could be a caching problem with the status service.

          It’s bad ways of handling your status page but it happens.

          • kautau@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            4 days ago

            It’s also a business decision. Many times companies will massage their verbiage and have a plan in place before they even change the status to “investigating” simply to appease when they have SLAs. It’s stupid, but that’s often the reason.

            • x00z@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              4 days ago

              It depends on the services, but in the end it’s pretty easy to spoof handshake packets to see if a service on a server is still running.

              nmap is a great example.

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          5 days ago

          Maybe somehow the problem was triggered in a way that the status page didn’t automatically detect it (for example, mine still works)? I’m really grasping at straws with that one. If it isn’t automatic, it categorically needs to be; if it is automatic but missed what’s apparently a major outage, then it needs to be fixed.

    • st3ph3n@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 days ago

      The iPhone app kept working for me, but the proton mail website was inaccessible for about 2 hours.

  • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    It had signed me out of the Proton Mail App on Android, first time that’s ever occurred, not sure it’s related though?