Dropbox Outage Map

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Dropbox Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  Mansi 👩‍💻 (@MansiCodez) reported 1 minute ago

  Solution of yesterday’s question: Design Google Photos: the part after the boxes “Hash it and put it in S3” fails the interview. Two phones compress the same sunset differently. Same photo. Two hashes. Two rows. You just built a worse Dropbox. The system needs three IDs, not one. client_upload_id — generated on the device before the first byte moves content_hash — hash of the exact bytes you received asset_id — the thing the user sees in the library Uploads are sessions. Library entries are assets. Blobs are renditions. If you collapse those into one key, retries, edits, and shared albums all collide. 1. Retries must be idempotent on the client, not on the filename Phone goes offline mid-flight with 612 shots, 40 already half-uploaded. Each photo gets a client_upload_id the moment it enters the queue. Chunks are uploaded against that ID. Commit is PUT /uploads/{id}/complete. Same ID + same bytes → same session. Server returns the existing asset. Late packet after commit is a no-op. Filename + timestamp is not an ID. Camera roll and AirDrop will mint two. 2. Exact dupes are content-addressed. Near-dupes are reconciled. After commit: look up sha256(bytes) if it already exists for that user (or the shared album’s owner set), attach the new upload to the existing asset_id do not create a second photo The 28 shared “Goa 2026” shots that are almost-but-not-quite the library copies will miss on sha256. That is expected. Run a cheap perceptual hash (pHash / dHash) + capture time + camera model from EXIF. If distance is tiny and captured within a few seconds, mark as near_duplicate_of and do not show two tiles. Keep both blobs if you must; hide one in the UI. Two devices, two compressions, one photo in the grid. 3. The library is a set of assets + tombstones. Not last-write-wins. Delete in Delhi must beat a pending upload in Mumbai. Every mutation carries: asset_id op: upsert | delete | restore actor_id (device or user) logical_ts (per-actor Lamport or hybrid logical clock) A deleted asset gets a tombstone that outlives the pending queue. When the flight-mode phone finally flushes those 40 half-uploads, the server sees: upload commit for an asset that already has a newer delete → commit the blob if you want, do not resurrect the tile. Refresh in Mumbai cannot show a photo Delhi just deleted, because the change feed is “tombstone wins over delayed create,” not “whoever wrote last.” 4. Shared albums are references, not copies Partner adds 28 photos to Goa 2026. The album stores {asset_id, added_by, added_ts} — not a second blob, not a second library row. Adds and removes are a small CRDT: add(asset, actor, ts) remove(asset, actor, ts) Two devices adding the same asset = one membership row. Phone sync finishing a second later cannot wipe the partner’s 28 photos, because there is no “replace the whole album document.” Last-write-wins on the album JSON is how photos vanish. 5. An edit is a new rendition, not a new photo and not an overwrite User crops + filters while the original is still processing. Rules: original blob is immutable edit creates rendition_id with parent_asset_id library still shows one asset “current view” pointer moves to the latest rendition history is a list of renditions / edit ops, not 12 full-resolution copies by default If you overwrite the original, face clustering and search lose their source. If you mint a new asset, the user now has original + edit as two photos. Both are wrong. Storage stays sane because you store: original (once) derived thumbs / display sizes lazily, keyed by asset_id + transform not every intermediate crop as a first-class photo 6. Upload path and ML path must not share a lock “Beach sunset with Priya” in minutes, not overnight, also not on the upload critical path. Commit path only: durable bytes asset row appear in library + album enqueue jobs Workers (thumbs, embeddings, face cluster, labels) are async. Search index is eventually consistent. The UI can show the photo immediately with “processing” on faces. If clustering blocks upload, you built a spinner, not Photos. Face identity hangs off asset_id, so an edit does not orphan Priya. The new rendition inherits the parent’s cluster and gets re-checked, not reset. 7. Sync is a checkpoint + change feed, not “download the library” Each device stores last_applied_ts. Server gives a stream: new assets, new renditions, album membership, tombstones. That is how 62,000 existing photos plus 612 offline shots plus 28 shared adds converge without a full rescan, and why a deleted photo does not climb out of another device’s queue. The one-line design Client-generated upload IDs stop retries from cloning. Content hashes stop exact clones. Perceptual reconcile stops “same sunset, different JPEG.” Tombstones stop resurrection. Album CRDTs stop last-write-wins from deleting the partner’s night. Edits are renditions under one asset. ML is a consumer of commit, never part of it. Boxes for S3, CDN, Kafka, Redis are table stakes. This is the part that decides whether you designed Google Photos or a photo-shaped file dump.

• 
  Founder Tribune (@Founder_Tribune) reported 2 minutes ago

  Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, on the day the scoreboard gets switched off: For your entire life, the water has come out of one hose. Then, as he put it to MIT's graduating class: "Today, one valve shuts off and now your job is to go out and find a new hose." His hose was Dropbox. Yes, building the company was "the most exciting and interesting and fulfilling experience of my life." But he immediately flagged the half nobody hears: "What you probably don't know, and what I haven't really talked about, this has also been the most painful and humiliating and frustrating experience, too." Not hard. Humiliating. He said he could look back over the years and not even count the number of things that had gone wrong. Then: it doesn't matter. Nobody has a 4.0 in real life. Once you're done with school, Houston said, the whole idea of a GPA just goes away. Bill Gates's first company made software for traffic lights. Steve Jobs's first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phone calls. Neither was successful, and in Houston's words, "it's hard to imagine these guys were too worried about it." Here's why that lands harder than the usual fail-fast sermon: A GPA is an average, every error permanent, weighted, dragged forward forever. It rewards never being wrong. What comes after is a maximum. The misses are discarded. Only the peak is scored. Most people struggle after graduation because they keep playing an average game inside a maximum game. "From now on, failure doesn't matter. You only have to be right once."

• 
  The Redeemed Artist (@Peace_Grenade81) reported 5 minutes ago

  I know I'm just screaming into the void. And there's probably less than like one or 2% of users that actually use this function. But I'm going to do it anyway. For the longest time the X app beta was absolute garbage on Android. It had serious stability problems, I couldn't use voice to text properly, and I couldn't access my memes from Dropbox, my cloud provider. The most recent change fixed all of the other problems except for my Dropbox integration. At first, I blamed X for this but I have since come to learn that the real culprit is Google. If you go into your app section and look for cloud providers they give you all sorts of choices so long as you like the choice that is Google's. Theoretically, other providers should be in here like Box or Dropbox. But Google has been playing footsie making rules about cloud provider integration and not actually approving anyone else. Google has become Microsoft. Google will tell you what cloud provider to use and it will conveniently be their own. Google will continue to upgrade their operating system closing off any other provider options or applications they simply disagree with for any reason at all. Meanwhile what this means for me is that I can't insert any memes or videos because they are all stored on Dropbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah I could go into Dropbox and then click on a photo and then share it to X and then make a post out of it. But what I can't do is respond to a post and insert a picture or a video directly through the X app. Don't know when this gets fixed, if ever. But I think it's time for Google to be investigated for monopolistic practices. I realize that this doesn't affect many people, but if you think they aren't coming for your various conveniences, I'm pretty certain that that's going to be proven wrong. Since I can't post a meme but only a local photo, here's an unrelated picture of a quilt we bought at auction. 🙄

• 
  AiMind (@AIMind_Ai) reported 8 minutes ago

  3 websites replace 20 hours of googling when you build a home server. The hard part of self-hosting is not the hardware. A used HP EliteDesk and a wall-mounted NAS cost almost nothing. The hard part is not knowing what you can even run, or how to avoid breaking the system on the first command. The first keeps a catalogue of self-hosted alternatives. Look up a replacement for Google Photos, Dropbox, or Notion, and you see what already exists, how many GitHub stars it has, and whether it is still alive. Plus a weekly digest of what shipped. The second lets you run any Linux distro straight in the browser. Arch, Debian, Alpine, Bazzite. Click once, and you are inside a live system, with no evening lost to a USB stick and a real install. The third handles the worst part. Install scripts for Proxmox: Immich, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager. Paste one line into the console and the container comes up on its own. Immich shows 17,735 installs; Docker 36,408. Each of those services used to cost an evening of documentation and three Stack Overflow tabs. Now it is one command. The hardware takes an hour to buy. These 3 bookmarks save you a month. Names in the replies.

• 
  Harpreet Singh (@hrprtsingh9) reported 9 minutes ago

  @jgreze @Dropbox Half of every revenue problem is a company being too polite to ask. The intern just asked.

• 
  M.Ellis (@MEllisPhotograp) reported 10 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport ive tried mircosoft edge but problem is stil present... do you think i might have been hacked or had bad file ?

• 
  Martin (@martin_valchev_) reported 13 minutes ago

  WordPress people - where do your site backups live right now? - Same server as the site - Google Drive / Dropbox - Dedicated backup service - Honestly not sure That last option is more common than anyone admits.

• 
  M.Ellis (@MEllisPhotograp) reported 16 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport I think bulk of problem is on computer / desk top yes... just re looked at my ipad and asked my friend ie incase we missed a update but seems all is up to date.. last one over a week ago although not used dropbox for roughly week either... I will try 4g hot spot before i sleep.

• 
  Vladislav Zharkov 👾 (@_vladislavzh) reported 18 minutes ago

  I have zero industry experience. None. I don't know how to use issue trackers, I need a GUI for version control, I deliver my files through Dropbox. I don't have templates, I restart or reuse every time. I don't use industry standard tools, I don't know workflows and pipelines.

• 
  Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reported 20 minutes ago

  System design question. How would you design Dropbox file sync with conflict handling? Constraints to make it real: 1) Clients are offline for days, then reconnect over flaky networks. Upload is resumable and idempotent. 2) Same file edited on 2 devices before either syncs. You need deterministic conflict detection (hash + version vector/etag?) and a UX for duplicates. 3) Renames/moves vs edits: preserve history and avoid treating rename as delete+upload. 4) Large files (2–10GB) need chunking, dedupe, and partial re-upload (content-defined chunking vs fixed). 5) Consistency: per-file ordering vs global ordering. What is the conflict scope and how do you prevent flip-flopping? 6) Server state: metadata store vs blob store, retention for old versions, and how you garbage collect orphaned chunks 7) Security: encryption at rest, per-user keys, and how sharing folders changes trust boundaries

• 
  Porro (@MagickPorro) reported 22 minutes ago

  @unknownhomer @hasen_95dx You see how we have gone from comparing omarchy to dropbox to saying it is just a cool rice? I have no problem with people chosing omarchy because it looks cool, i just don't want people to treat it as if it is an actually innovating software in any meaningful way

• 
  160 IQ haver Randy (@MinionTripper) reported 23 minutes ago

  @mittsh why would anyone use dropbox you can just setup an ftp server on a linux machine!

• 
  kfd&p (@kfdpcom) reported 25 minutes ago

  @mellolais___ @LIBSCRUSHER @Dropbox I went on their site and it does say that the .com access is having issues. I guess we just wait it out.

• 
  Alvin (@Alvin1492840) reported 26 minutes ago

  Kill the startup apps that have been draining your battery since day one. She opened System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. 14 apps were set to launch automatically every time he turned on his Mac. Spotify. Zoom. Adobe Creative Cloud. Google Drive. Microsoft Teams. OneDrive. Dropbox. A VPN he used once. A screenshot tool he forgot about. A calendar widget. And 4 more he didn't recognize. Every one of them was running in the background 24/7 consuming RAM, CPU cycles, and battery life whether he was using them or not. She said: "You turn on your Mac and within 30 seconds, 14 apps are fighting for resources before you've even opened your first document. Your fan spins up because your CPU is processing a traffic jam of apps you're not using. Your battery dies by 2pm because half your power is going to background processes you don't see." She removed 11 of the 14. Kept only the ones he actually needed at startup. The Mac booted in half the time. The fan stayed quiet. The battery lasted 3 extra hours. She said: "Check this list right now. If you see apps you don't use daily, remove them. They've been silently eating your Mac alive since the day you installed them."

• 
  Eric Smith (@Eric_Smith08) reported 32 minutes ago

  The full math. What he replaced and what he saved: 1.Dropbox ($12/month) → Google Drive (15 GB) + OneDrive (5 GB): $144/year saved 2.Zoom ($13/month) → Google Meet (60-min calls, 100 participants): $156/year saved 3.Notion ($10/month) → Google Keep + Google Docs + OneNote: $120/year saved 4.Todoist ($5/month) → Microsoft To Do: $60/year saved 5.Slack ($8/month) → Microsoft Teams free tier: $96/year saved 6.Grammarly ($12/month) → Microsoft Editor + Gemini/Copilot for rewrites: $144/year saved 7.Adobe Acrobat ($15/month) → Google Drive PDF viewer + Edge PDF tools + Word Online conversion: $180/year saved 8.Trello ($10/month) → Microsoft Planner: $120/year saved 9.ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) → Google Gemini + Microsoft Copilot (free tiers): $240/year saved Total monthly cost before: $137 Total monthly cost after: $0 Annual savings: $1,644 Total setup time: one weekend Saturday for Google migrations, Sunday for Microsoft configurations. Accounts created: 0 (he already had both) Apps downloaded: 3 (Microsoft To Do, Teams, OneNote all free) Browser extensions installed: 1 (Microsoft Editor free) Every replacement runs on accounts he created years ago. The tools were sitting behind the same login he uses for Gmail and Outlook unused, unconfigured, and paying rent to 9 other companies that built the same features on top of what Google and Microsoft were already giving away.