Notion is having a service interruption | Hacker News Reader

Notion is having a service interruption

status.notion.so

63 pointsstevekrouse39 comments

Does HN feel particularly slow to other people today? It usually loads for me in <500ms, and page loads are taking ~5 seconds now when other websites are completely fine.

I experience the same issue. Could be that a ton of people are looking here for information regarding all these service outages and delays.

Yeah I thought there was something wrong with my connection

Notion is always slow. So I stopped using it.

I would assume that all the people who are usually on Slack or Notion are here right now and it's making the server unhappy.

My thoughts exactly. (HN is slow here too, from the UK)

It would be interesting to see a plot of activity and new submissions with large outages like slack marked on it.

Yes, but only since a couple minutes ago.

Yep, HN is certainly running slow from the separate country that is New Jersey. ;-)

Yup. 5-6 seconds, which is 10x the usual latency I see as well.

Over the course of the last year I have been working on building a personal zettlekasten. I started in Notion, making several relational databases. However, after experiencing some down time, I decided to switch to Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) it's a much, much better program, does not have slowdown issues on my mac, is fully cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) and has a sync system that works pretty seamlessly. Not to mention that the files are all plain markdown and stored locally.

Another vote for Obsidian here.

It’s very good and the pace of their development is impressive.

I don’t use the sync. Didn’t want a cloud element. All local-only for me!

Totally - you can also easily sync it with your own service, if you don't want to use their sync service. The flexibility is definitely a huge selling point.

Another Obsidian here, not because I hate Notion, but I really don't trust depending on it being online.

> fully cross platform

Does it have a mobile app? This is what’s keeping me on Notion for the time being.

No it doesn't which is what is keeping me from moving from Notion to it. It's really clean and fast but all the hacks to get access to your notes on mobile (other apps that sort of work with the obsidian data structure) are a turn-off right now. When they do get mobile apps out then I really want to try to move to it.

+1 to the idea of locally stored Markdown files as a database.

Obsidian is a very neat tool but I'd generally preferred using VS Code. I've used roughly the same flow here: https://kortina.nyc/essays/suping-up-vs-code-as-a-markdown-n...

The backlinks functionality is a little more hacked on than the built-in Obsidian tooling but I find most of the other editing tools and extensions to be superior. Having my knowledge database be edited in my normal text editor is easier and more powerful for me.

They blamed AWS

> For the last couple hours, Notion has been down. This is related to some difficulties Amazon Web Services is experiencing today. As of right now, our engineering team is all hands on deck working to restore service. We're confident these issues will be resolved soon, but in the meantime I'm so sorry for any problems or inconvenience this has caused. I know this is not ideal as everyone returns from break, and we'll be thoroughly investigating how to prevent outages like this in the future.

I received that email but their status page doesn’t mention AWS anywhere, they just reported a fix has been implemented, so not AWS fault after all?

The cascading "herd DDOS" of everyone moving from slack to other channels for communication has started

Do many teams use Notion as a way of communicating?

Only when slack is down ;)

We mostly use Slack for communicating, but we use Notion for docs/planning/everything else

So I guess TEAMS is next?

Probably due to their build bots and employees not being able to communicate through Slack..

( joking, but.. )

Everybody trying to "autoscale" on the first work day of 2021?

> Investigating - Notion is currently experiencing an outage. We are currently investigating and will share further updates.

- Jan 4, 08:09 PST

0: https://status.notion.so/

Is there a way around the issues that cause service interruption? I was using self-hosted until my ISP proved itself to be unreliable, and moved to notion hoping that another host would have an easier time. Same issues - i need to update my CRM and am basically locked out of it until notion figures out the outage problem. is there another similar project that is al little more fault tolerant?

So Notion's backend DB is actually Slack channels?

Notion is about the only service today out of many other major platforms (see: https://downdetector.com) that cared to email me about the downtime. I’ve been a happy Notion user since about a year ago and this is probably the only one time I have experienced major downtime as far as I can remember.

Task managers must also have traffic spikes early in the new year...

Maybe they shouldn't use Slack as their backend /s

Seems there are several affected services https://downdetector.com/

It wouldn't surprise me if Indeed has most of its usage during the workday.

https://downdetector.com/status/indeed/

What is happening here? Am I reading this correctly? These are outages on a massive scale, affecting several international web services and infrastructure?

I think you just identified a strong contender for "next service to crash" ;)

I'm not sure if that's a normal spike, or not, but the recent spike in the graph there for AWS is a little ominous in context.

Those graphs are really misleading. All of the services look severly affected [0], though the number of reports differs significantly from service to service.

Slack: 16167 reports. Zoom: 224 reports. Google: 220 reports.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/KeIlwuV.png

I would expect the graphs to be normalized against a noise floor of how many people report the service being down "most of the time."

(And looking into it, indeed they are — looks like, in the detail view of a chart, there's a long-term weighted-running-average "baseline" value on the chart's data-points. See e.g. the dotted blue line on https://downdetector.com/status/google/. And the summary view seems to normalize its charts by their baseline.)

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