Dropbox Explains And Apologizes For Outage

If you’re a user of the popular cloud storage service known as Dropbox, you might have not be able to use it late last week. Now the service could have easily swept this under the rug, but they didn’t. Instead they’ve been shockingly transparent. Two blog posts have gone up to explain what happened. Here’s what you need to know:

On Friday at 5:30 PM PT, we had a planned maintenance scheduled to upgrade the OS on some of our machines. During this process, the upgrade script checks to make sure there is no active data on the machine before installing the new OS.

A subtle bug in the script caused the command to reinstall a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down.

Just as important, they said this:

We’re sorry for the trouble this caused, and we thank you for your patience and support.

I applaud this level of transparency as Dropbox admitted that they had an issue, explained what it was, and apologized. It is refreshing to see this as companies often have to be shamed into doing this, if they do it at all. That makes me want to continue to use Dropbox as clearly they have their users interests in mind.

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