Dropbox Outage Map
The map below depicts the most recent cities worldwide where Dropbox users have reported problems and outages. If you are having an issue with Dropbox, make sure to submit a report below
The heatmap above shows where the most recent user-submitted and social media reports are geographically clustered. The density of these reports is depicted by the color scale as shown below.
Dropbox users affected:
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.
Most Affected Locations
Outage reports and issues in the past 15 days originated from:
| Location | Reports |
|---|---|
| Paramaribo, Paramaribo | 1 |
| Bogotá, Bogota D.C. | 1 |
| Auxerre, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté | 1 |
| Salt Lake City, UT | 1 |
| Madrid, Madrid | 1 |
| Conneaut, OH | 1 |
| City of London, England | 1 |
Community Discussion
Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.
Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.
Dropbox Issues Reports
Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedSuper chad legendary interviwer at dropbox: You need to store 10 billion small files (1-10KB each). Block storage costs are $100K/month. How will you reduce storage costs? [Real problem at Dropbox]
-
Mark Cuban (@mcuban) reported@pvpandroids Just like box and Dropbox and Google gave away free storage and uber sold rides at a loss. It’s a competitive issue to start. At some point they will.
-
ᴾᵒᵗ ᵒᶠ ˢⁿᵉᵉᵈ (@P0tofSn33d) reported@Revolution61858 @Liliyalyv @2WBIA_Reformed ***** y dont u got yoself a dropbox or getchu a link tree wit all da links to download or some shieet so dat when dey take down 1 link u gots all sorts of avenues? Hustler Mindset *****.
-
avrl ☘ (@avrldotdev) reported3. The Sync Engine (Watcher) The Dropbox client uses a "File System Observer" Local Side: It detects a change as you hit Ctrl+S. Server Side: It uses a "Long Polling"/"HTTP/2 Stream" connection. The server keeps a connection open to your phone/laptop. As the metadata changes in the DB, the server "pokes" the other devices to start fetching the new blocks.
-
Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedA good system design interview question for a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer is: Design Dropbox. At first, Dropbox looks like a simple file upload and download system. User uploads a file, we store it, and later they can access it from another device. But the real complexity is not uploading one file. The real complexity is sync, conflict resolution, versioning, permissions, large file handling, offline changes, metadata consistency, deduplication, and making the system feel instant across laptops, phones, and web. I would start by breaking the system into two major parts: file content and file metadata. File content means the actual bytes of the file. Metadata means file name, folder path, owner, size, checksum, version, permissions, timestamps, and deleted/restored state. These two should not be stored together. File bytes should go to blob/object storage, while metadata should go to a database that supports fast lookups and strong correctness. For upload, the client should not send a large file as one big request. A 2GB video should not restart from zero because the Wi-Fi dropped at 95%. So we should split files into chunks, calculate checksum for each chunk, and upload chunks independently. Once all chunks are uploaded, the server creates a file version that points to those chunks. This gives us resumable uploads, retry safety, and better network usage. A very important optimization is deduplication. If 10,000 users upload the same popular PDF, we do not want to store 10,000 copies of the same bytes. We can hash file chunks and store only unique chunks. Metadata will point to the chunk list. This saves huge storage cost, but we must be careful with privacy and security. Dedup should happen in a controlled way, not leak whether another user already has a specific file. The metadata service becomes the source of truth. Every change like upload, rename, move, delete, restore, or share should create a new metadata version. This is important because Dropbox is not just storage, it is a timeline of changes. If the user deletes a file by mistake, we should be able to restore it. If two devices make changes offline, we should know exactly what changed and when. Sync is the heart of the system. Each client should maintain a local sync token. Whenever something changes, the server writes it into a change log. The client can ask, “give me all changes after token X.” This is much better than scanning every folder again and again. For near real-time sync, clients can use long polling, WebSockets, or push notifications to know when new changes are available. Conflict handling is where naive systems fail. Imagine a user edits the same file on laptop while offline, and also edits it from mobile. When both devices come online, which version wins? For normal files, the safest approach is to keep both versions and create a conflict copy. For collaborative documents, we need deeper merging logic, but for a Dropbox-like file system, versioning plus conflict copies is usually good enough. Permissions should be checked before every sensitive operation. Sharing a folder is not just adding one row in a table. If a folder has thousands of files, permission inheritance becomes tricky. We should model ownership, viewer/editor access, shared links, link expiry, team policies, and audit logs. Permission changes should be strongly consistent because users must trust that removing access actually removes access. Downloads should first go through metadata and permission checks. After that, the system can return a short-lived signed URL from blob storage or CDN. Public/shared files can be cached more aggressively. Private files need careful access control. Performance is important, but leaking private files for speed is not acceptable.
-
TechSnif (@techsnif) reportedDropbox founder Drew Houston steps down as CEO after 19 years, replaced by SVP Ashraf Alkarmi
-
𝓅𝓇𝒾𝓃𝒸ℯ𝓈𝓈 𝓵𝓾𝔁💗👑 (@payprncslux) reportedgot a new phone & laptop now I can’t login to my dropbox because I don’t have my old devices .. fml
-
John Lamont is making waifus (@jtl2dotnet) reported@ProtonPrivacy I sent a customer a file via @ProtonDrive and it got flagged as a virus. They were running Google Chrome and AVG on a Motorola device. Have you guys gotten any reports of issues with these? Same file on Dropbox went through without an issue.
-
Raziel (@tryraziel) reportedDrew Houston got rejected by every major VC in Silicon Valley before Dropbox became worth $10B. His story shows why persistence beats perfection. 2007: Houston demos file syncing to VCs. The response was brutal: → "This already exists" → "Google will just build this" → "Not a big enough market" One VC told him: "Why would anyone pay for storage when it's getting cheaper every day?" Houston's mistake: He was pitching technology, not the problem it solved. The pivot moment came when he made a simple 4-minute demo video showing Dropbox in action. No technical jargon. Just: drag file here, access it anywhere. The video hit the front page of Digg. 75,000 signups overnight. Suddenly VCs were calling him. Sequoia led his Series A. The same firm that initially passed. The lesson: VCs don't invest in features — they invest in problems worth solving. Houston learned to sell the pain point (lost files, USB drives, email attachments) before selling the solution. Today Dropbox has 700M+ users and went public at a $9B valuation. The rejections weren't about the product. They were about the pitch. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from getting rejected?
-
Colin Turner (@ColinTurnerTN66) reported@pinutos @AZAGMayes The Recorder can do that. Security is far too lax on the dropbox/early voting system and the board has shown no initiative to fix the problem. Looking forward to the suit.
-
Sean (@jishaochen89766) reportedLast night, I tried Obsidian at home. Download the software, install, use the extension "remotely save", and the problem came again... I don't know how to sync the file from Dropbox... So I restart again.....create a file folder and rename it set auth...refresh it still no sync
-
Gavin (Owner 67 Designs) (@67Designs) reported@DumbMoneyCapitl That could be argued, sure. But it misses the bigger picture. The real issue isn’t whether Jim and SCS have a working Dropbox—they clearly do. The problem is that VC funds are desperately hunting for places to deploy all their capital, and businesses like this simply can’t deliver the returns those funds require because of their heavy capex profile. It’s a classic square peg in a round hole from a funding and returns standpoint.
-
Adam Shurey (@AdamShurey) reported@devalara44 @ALeighMP I had the same issue, Dropbox are so annoying to deal with. I hope this new legislation helps.
-
Patrick Daniel Alpha (@PatrickDanielAl) reportedInstead, I point Claude at the shared Dropbox link. It reads the folder structure, finds the right product, and drills down into the High Res image folders automatically.
-
timbidefi (@timbidefi) reportedYou are being watched right now and you're paying for it, privacy isn't a feature, it's a decision you make. Google stores your emails, Apple logs your location, Dropbox reads your files. Every cloud service you pay for is a deal you didn't fully read, with a company whose interests are not yours. He read it, built this instead: Custom rack server in his home, fully self-hosted, zero third party access, every byte of data sitting on hardware he physically owns. Email, storage, VPN, everything, running on his infrastructure, under his rules. Nobody can sell it, subpoena it, or lose it in a breach he had no control over. It cost him a weekend to build and less than $300 to run per year. Your data is somewhere right now, the only question is whose terms it's living under.