Lavabit.com Down

[pe3]

I cannot access the website for the past 4 hours or so. Checked http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and it is down according to the website.

Can anyone share lavabit´s performance as an email server and how long can it take to restore itself, reasons it is down,...? Read in another thread that lavabit was just down less than a month ago, on May 16 due to server maintenance.

Starting to get concern with this site...

[cheviot]

Running into issues as well. Difference is that I can get to the log-in page, however it says that the password is wrong and/or account no longer exists.

I once had a paid account with them, as I am all about supporting the smaller independents. However, due to some failures to deliver on their end, I let it expire. I have only known of an outage once in the past few years, and it was back up within a few hours. This time, if it does not come back, I am not too concerned...

More info in this thread:
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=66818

[cheviot]

As of 8pm EDT it's up again...

[north]

down again!

pop/smtp and webinterface are not working atm.

confirm?

[communicant]

Originally Posted by north

down again!

pop/smtp and webinterface are not working atm.

confirm?

I reached the webmail login page OK, but after entering credentials I received a message saying the servers were undergoing maintenance. A check with isup.me indicates the site is not down, and I reckon that is technically true, although webmail is not accessible at the moment. Let's hope it is indeed just routine maintenance.

[testbolton]

Boohoo. Sorry that should be 9:48 AM EDT

[philtec]

Originally Posted by testbolton

Boohoo. Sorry that should be 9:48 AM EDT

It is now 10:01 am and not back yet.
The Lavabit backend servers are undergoing maintenance. Please try again later.

[north]

Now pop/smtp and webinterface unavilible! 17:30 cet (or 5:30 pm)

official news from the website:

News Bits

08.07.13

System is down for maintenance.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by north

Now pop/smtp and webinterface unavilible! 17:30 cet (or 5:30 pm)

We've been having some intermittent issues with the storage system over the last day or two.

We started moving mail to a new storage system today, but this is taking longer than expected -- we hoped to get everything finished during the off-peak times but things didn't work out that way. Sorry. :/

Incoming mail will be queued by sending systems for delivery once everything on our end returns to normal. No mail should be lost.

Sorry for all the trouble. We're working to get this sorted out as quickly as possible.

[north]

thank you for the information.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by north

thank you for the information.

You're welcome. Sorry again for the disruption.

For reference, we're posting details and updates here.

[kijinbear]

@PeteLavabit: If you're one of the owners of Lavabit or an employee who plans to stay for a while, please send a message to the mods so that they'll recognize you as an official representative of Lavabit. Several other email services have representatives here, and I'm sure their presence helps boost confidence in the companies they work for.

This is even more important because a perceived lack of support, along with the actual lack of any noticeable development in the past 5+ years, is one of the most serious worries that members of this forum seem to have about Lavabit. You might not want to bother because we're some random Internet forum that has no relation to your company, but you have an account here anyway, so why not?

Putting a link to your official update channel (Zendesk, company blog, Twitter, anything) on your homepage would be also appreciated.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

@PeteLavabit: If you're one of the owners of Lavabit or an employee who plans to stay for a while, please send a message to the mods so that they'll recognize you as an official representative of Lavabit. Several other email services have representatives here, and I'm sure their presence helps boost confidence in the companies they work for.

Will do. Thanks. I'm not an owner, just a minion.

This is even more important because a perceived lack of support, along with the actual lack of any noticeable development in the past 5+ years, is one of the most serious worries that members of this forum seem to have about Lavabit. You might not want to bother because we're some random Internet forum that has no relation to your company, but you have an account here anyway, so why not?

Indeed. You're right: there hasn't really been a huge amount of development at Lavabit over the last few years. It's a small company and our developer resources are somewhat limited.

That said, since I started working there two years ago the typical response time to support queries has been a few hours (though occasionally longer). Every non-spam inquiry gets a response.

Putting a link to your official update channel (Zendesk, company blog, Twitter, anything) on your homepage would be also appreciated.

Right. After some downtime earlier this year where some support queries submitted during the outage were lost (an exception to the above "all replies get a response" policy) we started migrating certain functions (like customer service ticketing) to Zendesk as it's an off-site provider that would be unaffected by any problems at Lavabit. After a few months of testing, we're confident enough to start using it in production and were hoping to roll it out properly in the near future. After we get this storage upgrade sorted out, that's next on the list.

[poma]

When the website just says

System is down for maintenance.

I feel irritated that we aren't told anything, don't know what's broken, when it might get better.

But when you say

Originally Posted by PeteLavabit

We've been having some intermittent issues with the storage system over the last day or two.

We started moving mail to a new storage system today, but this is taking longer than expected -- we hoped to get everything finished during the off-peak times but things didn't work out that way. Sorry. :/

Incoming mail will be queued by sending systems for delivery once everything on our end returns to normal. No mail should be lost.

Sorry for all the trouble. We're working to get this sorted out as quickly as possible.

I feel like "Oh, okay, thank you..."

So... I wish the website would provide better information.

[PeteLavabit]

Originally Posted by poma

So... I wish the website would provide better information.

Message received and understood. Thanks for your patience.

We're working on a bunch of things that should help improve notifications/communications with users (and the public): having some sort of public feed (perhaps on Twitter) to which people can subscribe to get updates, having more detailed announcements, having publicly-available schedules of upcoming planned maintenance, and others are all on the list of planned improvements.