Dropbox Outage Map

Community Discussion

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Dropbox Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  urBITCOIN (@BitcoinUr) reported 3 minutes ago

  No, no, no. You're thinking about it all wrong. A functioning file server would be a liability. If Urbit actually stored and served everyone's files reliably today, people would start using it for files. Then we'd have to make it fast. We'd have to make it redundant. We'd have to handle backups, syncing, corruption, support tickets. That's infrastructure. What we have is much more valuable. We have the *option* of being a file server. The vision of a file server. A file server-shaped hole in the future. Right now, every missing feature is proof of how early we are. Every failed upload is evidence of untapped potential. The fact that nobody can depend on it yet means the market is still entirely available. The moment it becomes a good file server, people stop asking how big it could be and start asking why it's slower than Dropbox. You don't want to be Dropbox. Dropbox has revenue. Revenue means expectations. Expectations mean accountability. Accountability kills narrative. We're building a decentralized, sovereign, peer-to-peer, identity-native, file-adjacent platform opportunity. The less it functions as a file server today, the more it can function as one tomorrow. It's a pure play.

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  Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reported 4 minutes ago

  A 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.

• 
  𝙎𝙄𝙕𝙀𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙮 (@SIZEplayProduct) reported 4 minutes ago

  Update: I was able to upload a clip via Dropbox to C4S using another Mac - maybe it has something to do with my MacBook? Even though it’s a few years old & has the latest software? Is anyone else having upload issues with #Clips4Sale?

• 
  Erlendur (@erlendur) reported 8 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport Web is fine (Firefox on Mac); for me it is your app on iPhone that is broken - no photos upload to Camera Uploads. Error is "some photos couldn't be uploaded". I retry and it is the same.

• 
  Kuramichan (@Kuramichan7) reported 9 minutes ago

  Is dropbox not working for anyone atm? I was JUST uploading some files and now it won't let me anymore, it keeps ending in "upload failed". It won't even let me delete folders either, it just gets stuck on a stupid endless spinning wheel or whatever. ******* hate this **** man

• 
  David Elliott (Author DG Elliott) (@dgelliott00) reported 12 minutes ago

  @mnsibley "Dropbox issues" was always a plausible excuse for me. Best part of being retired: nobody says "I'll put it in the Dataroom for you..." One time I renamed my colleague's trash can "Dataroom" on her desktop. My work load decreased 20%.

• 
  Néstor Planes (@NestorPlanes) reported 13 minutes ago

  Ben Thompson about The Consumer Market: "This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if someone signed up with your referral code, you got more storage — and grew extremely fast amongst consumers; the company then spent too long trying to actually build a business in the consumer space, before finally realizing that the only way to make money with what was ultimately a productivity product was by selling to enterprise. The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. The fact that Silicon Valley forgets this is downstream from Silicon Valley being a bubble; normal people aren’t looking for agents to buy them tickets to a concert. Still, the bubble was strong enough to convince OpenAI to make the exact same mistake Dropbox did: the company somehow convinced itself that it could make enough money selling subscriptions to consumers; Anthropic, meanwhile, realized that it was enterprises who were willing to pay for AI’s massive productivity benefits, even as OpenAI failed to capitalize on their consumer market penetration by refusing to build an advertising product. This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that Apple’s agentic shortcomings are a big deal, at least for now. Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don’t want to work or care about being productive. What they do want to do is watch short-form video, and an iPhone is simply much better at that than any other device ever will be; in that context, Siri being good enough is enough, and it appears that Apple crossed that bar."

• 
  Naughty kayla🤤💦 (@Naughtykayla127) reported 15 minutes ago

  Bored and horny 🥺 who is down for my Dropbox and ft Discount price 🤭#jacksonvillemeets #904freaks #jaxfreaks

• 
  Ryan Peterman (@ryanlpeterman) reported 15 minutes ago

  Top 3 takeaways from my conversation with @jamesacowling (CTO of Convex, former Senior Principal at Dropbox): 1) Career advice for the AI era - His take was that software isn’t about syntax or algorithms. It’s all about conceptualizing problems and coming up with clean solutions for them. And to build that muscle takes experience. He urged that people shouldn’t stop exercising that muscle or you’ll atrophy be left behind. Use AI but also make sure you aren’t being passive in your learning. The other major point he had was that using Claude Code isn’t that hard if you are a good engineer. The value isn’t in memorizing the details and learning all the latest AI tools. The important part is building things and solving problems that matter. He said you should just ignore Twitter for the most part and focus on what actually matters. 2) Fixing broken team incentives - The problem we discussed is when a team’s identity, mission and name all revolve around a system they own. What happens is these teams end up trying to protect the system rather than doing what is best for the company. The example fix James gave is when he was at Dropbox, he worked on a huge migration to move off of AWS. The resulting team was named after the system they built. He went out of his way to rename the team the “Storage team” instead. The reason this was so important is he felt that the direction of the team should be oriented around the problem they are solving for the company. Otherwise, imagine if moving back to AWS turns out to be better for the business. The team named after the existing system would have natural incentive to battle doing the right thing. He called this phenomenon “system bias” 3) Simple systems are the goal - To the untrained eye, simple systems can seem obvious but actually designing simple systems is much harder than building complex ones. And the key James mentioned is that simplicity reduces operational burden. Simple systems are easier to keep running and debug when they break. I asked him for a concrete example and he shared how Dropbox managed the metadata for where files are actually stored. All they did was have a cluster of 1000 MySQL nodes that stored the block ID and its location. Many people would say it wasn’t sophisticated but all the alternative proposals would ruin observability and simplicity of querying this data. The idea of complexity being incentivized in larger tech companies frustrated him. To him, the goal is to solve the problem not to check off the box for complexity.

• 
  Natan Hackbarth (@Natan90850688) reported 16 minutes ago

  @peterhowell I used the original pak0.pak. I tested both Dropbox and PixelDrain hosting and tested the exact URL format from the README The app reaches "Fetching PAK" but then fails with "Could not fetch PAK URL" and a 403 error. What hosting method did you use when testing your own pak0.pak?

• 
  AJ (@ce_aj100) reported 16 minutes ago

  @SsharmaKirti Maybe isse ek project bnalo... redundant file storage ( across various apps like dropbox, gdrive and local server ). And add video streaming capabilities based on the fastest avalable ( calculated dynamically ) service. I made this couple of years ago, but for different tasks

• 
  timbidefi (@timbidefi) reported 16 minutes ago

  You 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.

• 
  ex nihil nihilo (@PseudoEpicurus) reported 22 minutes ago

  @Dropbox Thanks for making looking at a shared cat video of 30 seconds a long ordeal by having me login or create an account (to view a shared video!!), sending a code, then just dumping me into my old files I no longer use, and having to go back to the original link just to view it. 🤬

• 
  ️️️️️️diego 🌐 (@xdxego) reported 22 minutes ago

  ofc when i need to deliver something to a client dropbox is down

• 
  BadUncle (@BadUncleX) reported 23 minutes ago

  @mitsuhiko Similarly, I still use the old version before 7. They try to force you to bind to their server-dependent version. I prefer to use dropbox to synchronize.