FM & POBox appear to be down - !st August @ 08:25 BST
 

FM & POBox appear to be down since about 08:25 BST.

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ says AOK - but, not for the first time this appears to be a misstatement !

NJSS

down for me too in Oxfordshire, UK (at least I cannot access it right now).

Their Pingdom status page confirms the problem: http://stats.pingdom.com/w17m1yxzjyin

Down in AU, I use this but no mention of the problem

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

Also down here in France (09:40, local time).

FM status has been updated:-

"We are experiencing network issues with several providers. Get updates on fastmailstatus.com as the situation progresses."

NJSS

...it's getting worse on Pingdom - now 7 out of 11 red lights...

Down in Spain

Down in China.

maybe a DDoS happens?

FM is down in Reno NV (USA)

FastMail Status: "We're experiencing network issues with several providers. Get updates on fastmailstatus.com as the situation progresses."

Sadly despite the problem being well over an hour old there have been no updates as of 09:45 BST

NJSS

yup - no updates are frustrating...

It reminds me of the old days when Fastmail used to be down. It hasn't happened in a long time though. I am awaiting their updates. The Android app is also unable to access.

POBox.Com UP at 09:53 BST
 

POBox.Com is back on line at 09:53 BST

Fastmail appears to be still down.

NJSS

Fastmail down - 09:59 WEST- Lisbon - Portugal
 

Fastmail down :(

Thanks for the new information than noone has discovered before you.

Lot of us has understand (also via pingdom reports) than zero FM customers have an access to his mails.

http://stats.pingdom.com/w17m1yxzjyin

The MXes can not be down more than 22/23h due to the mail rejects from remote MX services which stops retries after 1 day....

After the POBOXrecovery h1 or 1h30 ago, the MXes was good... so no mail lost

else

https://twitter.com/FastMail/status/1024590260460642304

No Pobox Webmail. Of course, it's on the same infrastructure as FastMail.

ok now in France.

OK now with me in the UK.

OK here in Spain

A reminder to all, of my EMD Favorites Twitter web page:

https://twitter.com/EMDiscussions/lists/emd-favorites

There had been a previous occasion where FastMail had tweeted about problems, but not got around to updating their own status page.

next time (please) move MX2 + either POP or IMAP on a secondary network ^^

Like to see this post (link) sticky on the Forum. Can Edwin take care of that?

Was DNS for custom domains affected?
 

I have a question for those who park their own domains at FastMail. Did the outage affect access to the DNS of those domains?

Hi vivil,

Thanks for your kindness on stating the obvious ( as I did ) directly to me ( when other users did the same).

It was not the main purpose. Just to let know that at that specific moment another user was trying to use the service without sucess. Can you tell me any tool that states how many users were not able to use Fastmail, when intended to, during the outage?

That will be of help.

Regards.

The Register has picked this up (folks can comment there if they like):
FastMail takes a nap in network blunder
Not our fault insists email slinger as customers twiddle thumbs

Glad its all ok :)

The Register seems to try to create controversy with every article, but this type of thing does deserve a robust customer service response. Have they sent out an email explaining what was happening? I, as a POBox customer, only learned of the issue via Twitter, which is invaluable for breaking updates like that. IMHO reliability and security are the top two items I look for in an email provider. Everything else is way down the list.

I agree. It is ironic that in another recent thread I opined that robustness and good privacy policies were FastMail's main selling points. Depending on the explanation of what happened, and what FastMail intends to do about it, I may be reevaluating.

I haven't received any and only found out about the issues on this Forum.

I don't believe Twitter should be a substitute for proactive customer service, including E-Mail notices of issues that affect subscribers' use of Fastmail.

Not everyone uses Twitter and there is no reason why a Fastmail subscriber should be forced to become a Twitter member in order to stay current with FM's goings on.

I've been a Fastmail paying customer for over a decade and remember the very old "good times" when Rob Mueller would actually reply to tickets.

In some ways, the Opera days were also good times compared to the depersonalized company that Fastmail has become during the last few years.

Having had a Runbox paid account for almost as long as my FM account and with RB's continued improvements and, more importantly, its personal touch, I've often thought of using RB exclusively. Unfortunately (for me, not for Runbox), I need an E-Mail provider with US based servers. If not for that, I would have canceled my two Fastmail accounts by now.

--
Jacinto

I agree that paying customers should not have to rely on Twitter, but assuming there is an email outage how exactly can customers be notified? Maybe they could have an option where any service warnings are sent to an alternate email address.

You ask a fundamental question and offer an excellent solution.

An alternate email address would be a great idea and one that other providers already have implemented. However, if the mail servers are down to start with, we go back to the chicken or egg question.

Opt-in SMS text alerts or phone calls would also work and would not depend on mail servers.

Having said that, Fastmail is not likely to invest what its owners could take home as profits to purchase the necessary equipment (or subscriptions to third party providers) in order to keep subscribers in the loop.

FM's management probably figures that Twitter is cheap or free to use and let those who are not members be damned.

--
Jacinto

No matter what precautions stuff does happen to every service provider. I have heard tell there have been Gmail outages, though I have never noticed one in more than a dozen years of use. I worked for a large email service provider in the past and we experienced an outage when a Tier 1 provider went down, knocking out the Internet for a large portion of the country. No redundant servers did us any good because they were in one location, though we were able to keep Canada up due to those servers being located there. We could still communicate with customers using our corporate email through Microsoft. The largest providers, like Google and Microsoft, can reroute to various server farms all over the world to get around major problems. The typical email service provider can't do that.

Can't or won't? :)

--
Jacinto

3 days ago Brong posted this on Hacker News:

Rob M. and now Bron promised us a blog post.

I agree, why do we have a Fastmail forum without fastmail, perhaps Edwin should change the title to Ex Fastmail forum.

Also the testimonials thread should be deleted as its out of date and most of the info does not relate to the last few years.

I suspect FastMail might be happy to see that thread go. It does not look good that there have been no new testimonials for about 15 months.

I regret the fact that FastMail no longer wants this forum in its original vibrant form. I think it still has value as a place for us to share experiences and perspectives.

Yes I suppose you are correct.

Really I should not come on here and complain about things I cant change, its just annoying to find that Fastmail have become very supportive on here and I dont use Tinder or what ever it is they use so we have no idea what is going on....and it keeps breaking down.