[HN Gopher] ProtonMail Is Down
___________________________________________________________________
ProtonMail Is Down
Author : digitalsanctum
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-07-11 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (protonstatus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (protonstatus.com)
| mattanimation wrote:
| good thing I just bought a 24 month pro sub last week...
| lizardactivist wrote:
| It sure was an excellent purchase -- one of the most secure
| services available world-wide, operated in the EU with strong
| privacy and completely outside US jurisdiction.
|
| You weren't able to collect your emails for a brief 5 minutes,
| but you'll live.
| martin8412 wrote:
| Switzerland is not in the EU.
| [deleted]
| rdevnull wrote:
| Hello from Switzerland :) We are not in the EU not just
| "technically" but as a fact. None of these agreement covers
| the exchange of private emails or metadata with the EU.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 2 things to ask.
|
| 1. why don't people selfhost email more? mailinabox is pretty
| painless to set up and would give you infinitely more
| security/privacy whatever you want. 2. why is email
| deliverability still an issue? why do you need to use third party
| email tools to ensure your email doesn;t go to spam? i am not
| concerned with newsletters/ads/ that sort of thing but a
| replacement to gmail/protonmail??
|
| i have personally gone with miab like last year and beyond the
| first few weeks of gmail putting my emails into spam(then having
| to inform the other user to unspam it), things have been
| painless. i get to occasionally spin up the ssh to update the
| server but its fine. backblaze b2 backups ensure i am somewhat
| safe(er). can it be better? yes. is it ready to be used in
| production, aka a replacement to your regular paid/free email?
| you be the judge but i am sold on this idea
| gobip wrote:
| You replied question 2 with question 1: we don't self host
| email, -because- of deliverability issues.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| why are they in the first place?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Spammers
| waynesonfire wrote:
| - because google would prefer you use gmail so they can
| train their data models on you
|
| - google would also prefer to have a monopoly on all email
| so that g-suite is necessary to reach your customers.
|
| - because your IP address was at one point an e-mail spam
| server, but, that only really matters because of the above
| two reasons. Any nit, however irrelevant, will be used used
| to beat you into using gmail.
| skadamat wrote:
| Deliverability is an issue in both directions:
|
| - when you send emails from MyWebsite.com, you want to make
| sure that Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Proton Mail, etc users get
| your email.
|
| - when you receive emails to your hi@mywebsite.com email,
| you don't want spam
|
| V1 of email providers ostensibly solved this problem using
| lots of data as well as "supervised" machine learning (e.g.
| you telling the provider that a specific email is spam).
|
| Self-hosting seems awesome if you're only handing out the
| email to a few people (probably a few hundred max?), you
| don't think it will be widely shared, and it's a slightly
| unique email that makes it hard for a script to guess (e.g.
| "hello@mywebsite.com" will be easily guessed but
| "john2@mywebsite.com" may not be)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| You can self-host email all you want if you intend only to
| receive. If you want to be received, by O365/Gmail - that's
| another story.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > why is email deliverability still an issue?
|
| Mostly what I've found as the main issue here is that popular
| blacklists will blacklist entire IP blocks instead of
| individual IPs, so you have to not only have a clean IP but
| also be on at least a /24 with all clean IPs. This can be hard
| to manage when relying on outside hosting. And unfortunately,
| trying to get around it by using a cheap/free relay like Amazon
| SES or SendGrid doesn't work, as they fail to keep their IPs
| clean (if they're even trying).
| lom wrote:
| Was down 5 minutes ago, but is now working again for me
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've been having trouble with iCloud all day too. (Try Apple ID >
| Password and Security on your iOS device). It surely can't be
| related.
| bilkow wrote:
| A minute ago StackOverflow was also throwing "Oops! Something
| Bad Happened!" to me on many different pages. I wonder if
| that's somehow related or just a coincidence.
| [deleted]
| devmunchies wrote:
| Has to be related to this maintenance announced a couple days
| ago[1]
|
| > _" We're conducting a short database intervention on Sunday,
| July 10th, 2022, between 9:00 - 10:00 am GMT+2. During this time,
| users will be unable to access all Proton services for 2-4
| minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience."_
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/ProtonSupport/status/1545698028895584257
| ugjka wrote:
| Down hard
| futuretaint wrote:
| its like blackhawk down but w/ proton mail.
| ugjka wrote:
| I mean the connection drops immediately, unlike the other
| times when it spins forever
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like
| their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a
| 'partial' outage.
|
| I don't care if I can't access my email for a while.
|
| I very much care if email sent to me isn't received. They should
| just be dumping all mail received at their MX's to maildirs or
| something if it's this bad and process them properly later.
| Losing data is not ok.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| SMTP is literally built with this scenario in mind. As long as
| their servers aren't incorrectly reporting a success the sender
| will (or at least should) retry.
| [deleted]
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Sorry about that.
|
| I just moved the domain for my small business over to ProtonMail
| (where I already hosted my personal email). The fact that I did
| that guaranteed that it would go down. :)
| browda wrote:
| I was logged-in -- and composing a message -- a few minutes
| ago. First there was that cannot reach backup server message
| followed by a bunch (don't you just love technical jargon?) of
| messages saying "Could not..." and then lost the message when
| the site itself apparently went down. (Well, Firefox was
| seriously unhappy...) I was ready to blame my ISP again but no,
| this one is on proton mail. (It's pingable and traceroute is
| happy.)
|
| I'm really glad that we didn't move our business over...
| [deleted]
| Trias11 wrote:
| Slower login, but works
| DavideNL wrote:
| " _Proton Mail mobile apps are are now operational again, and so
| is Proton Calendar._ "
|
| https://nitter.net/ProtonSupport
|
| also RSS feed:
|
| https://nitter.net/ProtonSupport/rss
| amatecha wrote:
| Rather ironically, the site they link to for the incident status
| updates ( https://status.protontech.ch/incidents/195 ) is not
| loading for me: "The connection has timed out"
| motohagiography wrote:
| Irony is the people most likey affected by a protonmail outage
| would be political staffers and strategic PR firms who would
| suddenly need to use messengers subject to disclosure.
|
| As someone taken out by the Rogers outage last week, I'd be
| concerned the infrastructure of western powers may be too fragile
| to project power in a seriously contested conflict.
| Jaepa wrote:
| I'm kind of curious what the source of the outage is.
|
| It looks like most of their services are down, including their
| incident status page1. The number of things I can think of that
| so many different services & are not a massively catastrophic
| failure is pretty small. Though that may be a lack of imagination
| on my part.
|
| 1: https://status.protontech.ch/incidents/195
| krn wrote:
| > The number of things I can think of that so many different
| services & are not a massively catastrophic failure is pretty
| small.
|
| Like, for instance, a simple DNS or BGP misconfiguration that
| takes the entire network down?
|
| Cloudflare (June 2022):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823132
|
| OVH (October 2021):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28849319
|
| Facebook (October 2021):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131
|
| Google (June 2019):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| We don't know for certain, but you may have missed Rogers [0]
| - which brought down cell phones (every function but wifi),
| debit transactions, and 911 services.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communication
| s_o...
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| No ones it too big to not fuck up BGP or DNS from time to
| time.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Maybe it's the same hard drive problem a lot of others
| (including HN) had.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Doesn't have to be catastrophic failure. Most people just
| assume that such services are architected properly to be HA,
| but they usually aren't. They also aren't operated as HA
| usually, so things like a config change are rolled out globally
| to everything at once, and then everything breaks and they
| can't roll back, and you have total outage. Very common.
|
| ...and of course, they might not be down at all, it might just
| be (example) a route from the west coast got fucked in a BGP
| table so the west coast can't access it, and if that's where
| the majority of their users are that's all the comments you'll
| see.
| sllabres wrote:
| A bit nitpicking but even with a proper implemented HA
| solution there would be a service interruption.
| confounded wrote:
| What is HA?
| detaro wrote:
| high availability
| Pryde wrote:
| High Availability
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I'm seeing their status page up now.
|
| But they are down hard otherwise.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| maybe the status page is therefore also down, misleadingly
| showing its last pre-down state
| willis936 wrote:
| They have another status page that currently reports everything
| is up (it isn't).
|
| https://status.proton.me/
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| And another that says that some systems (many systems) are
| experiencing issues/in a state of "partial outage":
|
| https://protonstatus.com/
| KineticArms wrote:
| "An error occurred on client"
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| https://protonstatus.com/incidents/195#update-201 45
| minutes ago : Our engineering team is working on a database
| performance issue which is impacting Proton services
|
| Relational database woes. :( Probably re-indexing or slow
| queries or something. This is why companies with an RDBMS as a
| SPOF need a good DBA.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I thought it was my phone or vpn, I restarted it many times.
| Where would I be without HN :-)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 3 days ago, not very far!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32023848 [Hacker News was
| down]
| willis936 wrote:
| Geez if both were down at the same time I might have no
| option but to touch grass.
| vaylian wrote:
| funny that you say that: "HN is up again"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32026571 2 days ago
| john-radio wrote:
| > Where would I be without HN :-)
|
| Reading the regular news like an idiot!
| usr1106 wrote:
| Just remember, clicking on refresh and searching the net what is
| going on want make the problem go anyway faster. Few of us
| urgently depend on email just this hour. An even if you do
| setting your alarm to some suitable interval and just doing
| something else is much more productive. Just act like the Arab
| cliche taxi driver who takes the hands of the steering wheel when
| it gets tight and say Allah will steer (No insult to anyone, I
| have never visited any Arab country. Probably the story is not
| true anyway, but a nice anecdote to accept things you cannot
| change.)
|
| When hackernews was down recently I wanted to report it as big
| news in our company chat. But it was rather late here and I had
| already closed all work stuff for the weekend. So I first slept
| and when I woke up everything was working again. Oh yeah, I
| missed to share the scoop with my colleagues, but I guess I'll
| manage without any damage to my professional reputation.
|
| Edit: Reading post-mortem afterwards is a different story. If
| it's well written instead of some corporate communications
| emptyspeak one can learn something. No mistake happens only once.
| gruez wrote:
| >Few of us urgently depend on email just this hour.
|
| I agree that you shouldn't be manically refreshing your email
| every 5 minutes, but my mail service being down for a few hours
| would definitely be a major inconvenience if I needed to get a
| 2fa code during that time. Same if I needed to look at my email
| to view my tickets for an upcoming event.
| favourable wrote:
| It's a misfeature using e-mail for 2FA login codes. TOTP is
| far more reliable. Any service doing e-mail only 2FA should
| be called out and questioned. Never assume a user has access
| to their email at all times.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Right, I must admit I had never heard of email being used
| for 2FA codes. Is that some kind of standardized protocol
| or something completely homegrown?
|
| In the far past (and still today with 2 banks) I use
| hardware/smartcard based solutions. But everything vaguely
| IT world seems to use TOTP. They typically advertise it as
| Google Autenticator, but I use different FOSS
| implementations on both PC and phone and they have worked
| 100% smoothly.
| usr1106 wrote:
| That sounds like an fragile setup if you depend on a single
| email account to get 2FA codes. I have them configured
| typically on my office workstation (reachable remotely if
| everything works), on my laptop, on my phone, and I have the
| static backup codes in my password manager which is also
| distributed over several indpendent machines.
|
| Of course if you have to respond to incoming tickets within a
| guaranteed short timeframe that gets a problem if nothing can
| come in.
|
| Make your risk assessment in advance: Can I live without it
| for a while, in the worst case even until I have an
| alternative provider? If so then just do so when an outage
| happens. If that's not acceptable for your case you need to
| have an independent backup before the first outage.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I'm on it now, must be back up?
| hamaluik wrote:
| Still down for me :(
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Correction, its down.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Agreed. I'm back up too
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-11 23:02 UTC)