Fastmail is down | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail is down

fastmailstatus.com

85 pointslrae36 comments

It's already back up, and I didn't notice any issues. From my perspective (is it up when I need it?), even if you count this 30 minute outage against them, they're still above 5 nines for me.

I've encountered many gmail (mostly imap) outages in the last 10 years, and mostly moved off of them when I moved to fastmail. Even if they've had 100% uptime since I last checked, they're still nowhere close to getting back up to 5 nines for me.

Yeah I’ve basically never had issues. I wish I could convert more people to Fastmail, they’re a great company.

The only time I had issues was when I made some gnarly config attempting to auto-sort all of my emails, and their support rep was very knowledgeable and useful. An actual response from real humans, who actually listened to me instead of checking boxes of “have you tried turning it off and on again”.

It’s a recommendation that I originally got from HN, and hopefully others will see all of the positive comments in this thread as well :)

Only thing that still frustrates me constantly: their mobile app doesn’t work offline. If you want that, you’ll need to set up IMAP with another email client (like Apple mail)..

Fastmail does a lot of things right, that others typically overlook, and I really appreciate that about them.

Like how their status page is on a completely different domain (not subdomain) and hosted at a different webhost.

So we can continue to get updates like we are right now even when things aren’t going as planned.

Hope to see a detailed breakdown of the issue and a good retrospective.

Downtime with email services has large disproportionate impact than other services (I am right now waiting on a magic link to login into Slack).

Curious, has GMail or iCloud mail ever had a downtime? I can't remember GMail ever having issues.

> Curious, has GMail or iCloud mail ever had a downtime?

Plenty of times.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=gmail+down

I remember one big one.

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-eve...

Gmail does have downtime, definitely more than most people would ever notice, but it's rarely global for all users. I can't speak to iCloud.

I wouldn't have noticed the previous Fastmail outages if it weren't for HN, either, though I could just be an outlier too.

Yeah I have been using Fastmail a decent bit today and haven’t noticed anything. I still can’t tell anything is wrong clicking around the app now.

iCloud was down a couple weeks ago for most of a day. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/01/icloud-mail-down/

It definitely happens to other providers.

Additional info now:

16 Nov 2022 06:33:23 UTC

We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack. We have a number of mitigations in place to minimize the attack’s effects. Some customers will see a degradation of services.

IMAP times out for me as well.

That said, I've used Fastmail for years and this is the first time I've had any sort of issue. Can still greatly recommend it.

Fastmail status page is updated now:

> 16 Nov 2022 05:57:15 UTC

> Some customers are experiencing interrupted access to Fastmail services. We're looking into it.

Seems down for a couple of minutes now.

Webmail, App & IMAP are all dead.

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ does not show anything yet.

As of 5:57 UTC the status page says:

"Some customers are experiencing interrupted access to Fastmail services. We're looking into it."

Now (6:33 UTC) it says:

"We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack. We have a number of mitigations in place to minimize the attack’s effects. Some customers will see a degradation of services."

I had the pleasure of working with the people from Fastmail while they where owned by Opera Software. I had a lot of respect for how they operated their systems back then, and I'm sure it's even better today.

I miss all the Tim Tam's they brought to our Oslo office!

Just tried to reload my email inbox and after 30+ seconds, it was still “spinning”. Frustrated, I pulled up HN while waiting and saw this.

Thank you, OP and HN. Much appreciated. Glad to know I haven’t lost my mind. Completely. Yet.

(No promises in the years to come! Mwahahahaha!)

;-)

A handy bookmark to have is https://betaapp.fastmail.com/login/ which (if any past incident is an indicator) is separate infra than production and thus can continue to work

I enjoy the beta version so much that I just live on it all the time, if that helps set expectations about how "beta" it is

Personal web sites hosted are also down. I take responsibility, I was updating my web site at the exact moment it went down.

> 16 Nov 2022 06:33:23 UTC

> We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack. We have a number of mitigations in place to minimize the attack’s effects. Some customers will see a degradation of services.

Joy. But the app is back up for me, at least.

Same here. Desktop mail client just had its first successful connection in a little while.

Same. Able to open the web and mobile versions but the 1Password masked mail integration is still busted. Sucks about the DDOS but hope they can resolve the issues soon

Update: the integration is also working now. Good stuff. Thanks Fastmail team!

Half wondering if the elevated traffic is from the hn hug

I was pretty ticked that it was down right when I wanted to send an email to notify a client that I’d done something I’d promised by COB. Not like it happens often, though. They’re a good provider.

My company's internal Gitlab is also down. Is it (somehow) related?

No network response.

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/fastmail.com reports it's down, too.

Dunno about "everyone" but web and imap are both down for me.

I find Downdetector more helpful in those cases https://downdetector.com/status/fastmail/

The iOS app told me I should update it. After I did, it still says it’s out-of-date, but now I’m completely blocked from using it. Not a good update.

Completely broke on iOS now. It says to update but there is no update.

Uninstalling and installing again seems to have fixed it.

Working fine for me. Perhaps already resolved?

ahhhh I did have one email fail to send earlier, SSL error, but it sent when I retried just seconds later

So many developers, so many mail accounts, such an old and simple protocol.. Why haven't anyone rolled their own with modern infra principles? And shared it with others.. Perhaps in another jurisdiction with GDPR

You mean like JMAP?

Back up for me.

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