Earlier today, a subset of Proton users experienced intermittent service disruptions.
The incident began during exceptional database maintenance following last week's datacenter overheating incident. The maintenance had been tested and was expected to cause only a brief disruption.
However, the switchover exposed additional instability under high load, and this forced us to remove some additional infrastructure from service and operate at reduced capacity for a time.
We have now stabilized all Proton services and all are currently operational. No user data has been lost. We apologize for the disruption.
I understand that incidents happen and that no provider can control everything. However, this is becoming a serious issue for Proton’s brand image.
Email availability is critical. People rely on it for business communications, account recovery, security alerts, invoices, and time-sensitive messages. Seeing “residual hardware failures” and “reduced capacity” after last week’s overheating incident is worrying.
My main concern is not just temporary access to my mailbox: are incoming emails being safely queued, delayed, bounced, or potentially lost?
Privacy is important, but reliability is equally essential for an email provider. I hope Proton provides clear reassurance about message delivery, data integrity, and the steps being taken to prevent this from happening again.
This. Email is fundamental here. If dealing with reduced capacity they need to prioritize services. Degraded performance for Lumo? Fine, I can live with that for a while. Meet or Drive? Annoying. But email is critical.
Got a new car and they wanted me to activate the phone app. I had fun waiting for my account email confirmation activation code for the app for 20+ minutes. He kept saying using it takes a few seconds and I'm like maybe they're selling alot of cars today. 😆😆
But the queue did work. Some of my failed attempts, I got the activation code two hours later. 😆
While i agree that outages happen and its not that much of a big deal i cant but feel that is happening more often than some years back.
I got locked out of proton pass and this is much worse than just not being able to send or receive emails...
I woke up to my pass logged out on all my devices. That's really not chill and thank god i have a backup for my 2fa of proton itself.
There is an important criticism to be had here, deal with it is not a reasonable response this time...
Their ToS actually say they provide a 99.95% service. Curious to see if they will make good on that but maybe not because this could fall under "issues caused by factors outside of the Company’s reasonable control"
That said, IMO this sentiment is quite silly. There's no real need to defend Proton on this. To also be a bit of a devils advocate, it's not like they could've fixed their redundancy weak points in such a short time but I do hope they address these going forward so this whole service is less likely to depend on one data center.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. 99.95% comes out to ~4 hours and 22 minutes of downtime a year. I counted on this TOS (SLA) when I purchased Proton and decided to move my business email here.
Yes, I understand servers are expensive; I'm in the infrastructure game, but there are PLENTY of CPU/Memory servers on the market (non-GPU-based workload), and sure, it's a memory squeeze; prices are higher, but server hardware is bought, sold, and resold all the time), But what I heard was that datacenter maintenance happened unannounced, which means we have poor vendor management of the datacenter colo (communications, expectations, choice). That means that Proton is accountable for their vendors.
Pretty sure an entire platform being down isn't comparable to an AI chat resource. Password Managers are pretty mission critical, they should have some sort of dr/contingency plan in-place, even if that means offline access (like literally everyone else.)
Yes and no, they should investigate the root cause and implement a solution.
Hardware redundancy can be a part of the solution, but overall it's often better to first focus on finding the root cause before quickly jumping to solutions.
The one big mistake I do see them keep making is underplaying the downtime and number of people affected.
Transparency and honestly are needed for trust, especially with sensitive and critical infra.
Unacceptable, because Proton already identified this known risk scenario after the August 27 datacenter heating/cooling Incident; this could have been mitigated by already having provisioned failover or additional capacity infrastructure, but they did not.
"While we were able to save almost all of the infrastructure, some servers unfortunately suffered heat death, and we don’t know yet if the heating incident will impact the lifespan of the surviving equipment."
Do you know how long does it take to buy, deploy and configure server infrastructure? This isn't Amazon where u get your shit delivered doorstep the next day.
How are they going to mitigate hardware failure in 4 days. As of now it takes literal months to buy / replace hardware. Short of removing the entire datacentre from their reduncancy plans, this cant be mitigated in 72ish hours.
Yes, mine dropped into offline mode, started having issues, then logged me out completely with an invalid access token. Something went very wrong today.
No such thing as 100% SLA. It is to be expected that outages can happen back to back especially after dealing with heat damage. Heat is one of the worst ways hardware can get damaged as they are only rated to a certain temp. High temps mean unexpected and random failures. They is why cooling is the most critical thing in a datacenter. You got to give them credit for being honest and open. They also have been working on expanding their infrastructure, which does not happen overnight. Its a methodical process.
How many sites does Proton use? Assuming they have multiple hot sites (no pun intended), how could an overheating incident knock out redundant servers at backup sites?
I‘m gonna move as soon as my paid year ends. Proton left me behind twice in less of 2 weeks. I can‘t Access my Account at law Environments because Proton is offline.
Outages happen. Anyone who has worked in technology, especially infrastructure, can tell you this happens. Yes, it sucks. Just deal with it. I hope it gets resolved soon.
"just deal with it" is not an acceptable response for a paid product. A company that provides this type of services should have redundancies in place to deal with this type of problems
My point is Gmail is free so their outages are less annoying. As a paid customer I expect proton to have redundancies in place. All the “deal with it” comments are ignoring. I run my own services at home and I have redundancy in place. It’s not difficult
Exactly right and that is what I'm going to do. However, I had JUST been trying to look into an alternate to Gmail and Proton Mail was an option until it wasn't. Apple it is I guess.
And now it seems like their mobile website is down (haven’t tried it on my laptop yet but am not feeling hopeful it would be any better). Barely loaded and looked bizarre.
Legitimately amazing seeing the straight up obnoxiousness of individuals thinking companies should never have downtime at all for maintenance. Even fucking Apple does this.
On top of that they’re literally telling you what’s happening.
If we are using OP’s logic then OP should have a backup email provider for redundancy.
The thing is Proton provides critical services to everyday life like proton pass and proton mail, I need to log in to my brokerage account but I can't access proton pass for my password so I've tried to reset it but I can't login to proton mail. It's unacceptable.
I completely understand the sentiment here, as this is incredibly inconvenient. Yet, to be quite honest, there is not much Proton could have done about last week's outage or the current one. Both AC systems failing simultaneously is incredibly rare, and a DC heats up very quickly if there is no AC.
The data center seems truly at fault here. Doing maintenance on both your AC systems at the same time is just stupid. Beyond that even, it is willfully ignorant. I hope Proton has them pay for all the damage they did at current market pricing, so that we don't pay the bill for this.
what's even more interesting is that your post had zero votes, I've added an up vote and within seconds someone downvoted it back to zero. Wonder who pays for bots to do this
Yeah... and proton pass is down, so im locked out... I was waiting to move out but I guess its gonna have to be sooner than later, it took me a long time to convince my wife to move here and its been issue over issue... lol damn Murphy law
I can now open my mailbox but I have tried sending two test emails and neither has made it to the external account even though they say sent on Protons side
We get it, everyone is upset. No company is perfect, we know SOP’s we’re not followed which lead up to the failures - but where someone like u/andy1011000 shines is by being transparent. As a leader in IT, I’m a strong believer that one is always learning and always improving.
I have a decade in with them, It probably won't make me pivot, but damn, we should get a bonus storage slot or something if they can find one in the embers of the Frankfurt fire or whatever.
Don't listen to the zealots. Apple is just fine and scores high for privacy. You'll be fine. The new CEO of Apple isn't going to gobble up your emails 😅
Did you read the article you posted? It says "Had Apple complied with the U.K.’s original demands, they would have been required to create a backdoor not just for users in the U.K., but for people around the world, regardless of where they were or what citizenship they had."
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u/Proton_Team Proton Team Admin 14h ago
Earlier today, a subset of Proton users experienced intermittent service disruptions.
The incident began during exceptional database maintenance following last week's datacenter overheating incident. The maintenance had been tested and was expected to cause only a brief disruption.
However, the switchover exposed additional instability under high load, and this forced us to remove some additional infrastructure from service and operate at reduced capacity for a time.
We have now stabilized all Proton services and all are currently operational. No user data has been lost. We apologize for the disruption.