On 5th of October 2010 – exactly the time when i decided to go for it (18:00-22:00 GMT) – dropbox had a massive outage of nearly all services. At least in my area. I found out that “my” dropbox servers are located in russia and there is no latency. So i was able to download the client, bud when i registered, i received an error (registration failed). Nonetheless, i got a warm welcome email in my inbox! ;-)
From then on it went crazy. I accidentally wanted to know about dropbox as a company and clicked on “Our Team” on dropbox.com – bang!!!
“Error (5xx) – Something went wring. Don’t worry, your files are still safe and Dropboxers have been notified. Check out our Help Center or forums for help. Or maybe you should try heading home.”
still safe? lol!
The dropboy client is annoying me with a “Reconnect Now” button – of course i am not offline but they are. So i cannot login or register.
I googled a bit on the net and i found a link to a dropbox status page: http://status.dropbox.com/
Awesome!
At first, some broken image links appeared and it’s being stated that the web is running normaly – yeah, sure, check error 5xx above! ;-)
Some minutes later, the images appeared finally, and also the web is stated as being down correctly!
But then – there was the “500 Internal Server Error” and nothing was working anymore! :-(
So honestly, I am not sure about dropbox…just because it happend exactly during my registration. Something was warning me! I will use TrueCrypt in combination with dropbox to secure my files for starters…Not that Zuckerberg buys all my data and posts it on Facebook! :-))
OK, everybody makes mistakes, that’s ok! Systems go crazy and everything can go down. No big deal. I even like the status page a lot! That’s a cool feature for sure! The dropbox ops seem to be nice guys and after the site went available again, one could even read, that they really are aware of the problem and they’re working on it…A couple of hours are a lot if you need something urgently though!
So I will try my luck today again and if they have issues again, I think I will go for my own SparkeShare!