Users of the cloud storage provider Dropbox suffered from service disruptions for nearly 48 hours. During that time users were e.g. unable to sync files. Friday night the entire Dropbox site went offline and it took the Dropbox developers till last night to get things properly running again.
Friday night the Dropbox website went offline, it's unclear whether during that time also the sync service was disrupted. Clear is that Dropbox users had problems with the service until Sunday night. Issues with the Dropbox apps and the synchronisation software persisted until Sunday late.
First a hacker claimed to be responsible for the issues but Dropbox released an official statement later on. The cloud provider states the issues were caused by a failing update script which should have upgraded the operating system of the database servers. This went wrong as it was performed on actively used servers which resulted in the servers going down. Due to the large size of the databases it took a long time to bring them back online.
Dropbox stresses that the databases that went down weren't used to store files of users and that files were never in danger of being lost. According to the company the upgrade script has now been changed to make sure the upgrade is only performed on servers that aren't actively used at that moment. With an improved backup-and-restore tool the cloud provider hopes to speed up the process of getting servers back online again, and the company promises to open source it.
