Dropbox Postmortem Statement Regarding Recent Outage
Dropbox recently suffered an embarrassing service outage over the past weekend that left many clients without access to their files. Some reports suggest that the outage lasted between 150 and 180 minutes. Others say that they were unable to get to their files all weekend long. Early twitter posts suggested that Dropbox had been hacked. Dropbox top brass quickly cleared up any of that chatter by taking full blame for the recent outage and implementing a fix as quickly as they could. The downtime was not consistent across the Dropbox users. Some did not experience an outage at all.
Dropbox is one of the top free cloud storage options available to users. The company is based on a freemium model which allows users to purchase additional space as they need it. Dropbox has always been upfront and honest with its customers. They recently posted a blog post which completely explained the outage and what they have done to never experience this type of incident again.
A statement was released by Akhil Gupta which said, “A subtle bug in the script caused the command to re-install a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down.”
Gupta was also quoted as saying, “To restore service as fast as possible, we performed the recovery from our backups.”
Gupta went on to assure DropBox users that their data was safe and never susceptible to loss during the whole process. Many technical experts have weighed in suggesting that the mistake described on the blog entry by Gupta was a rookie mistake of sorts. This has left many people skeptical of Dropbox’s service.
Others who still support and use Dropbox are more understanding. Dropbox says that most of the system was back up within 3 hours however a database backup implementation may have made more obscure features unusable until the database was available again.
