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Fastmail Is Down
- vulcos 3y agoLove Fastmail - happy to live with a small outage - still out here in SW UK - any suggestions on another way to access my e-mail would be gratefully accepted.
- newaccount74 3y agoI'm a bit bummed that the impact on the status page is listed as "degraded performance". It's completely unreachable for some users. I just set up 3 people with Fastmail yesterday, and today they are asking me why it doesn't work :( It's also funny how random the problem seems to be. It works for me, but a friend 200km away hasn't been able to reach Fastmail all day.
- probablecauses 3y agoThe problem is not at Fastmail, and it is not at your ISP (edge/connection) - the problem appears to me to be somewhere in the global interconnection of various networks/routing - This may be extremely difficult to solve. Already Fastmail down more than 12 hours. Definitely suggest trying a different internet connection - most people will have access to several - your cellphone mobile network, your wired/home network, your business network, a VPN may help. What I see from reverse traceroute (http://traceroute.org http://traceroute.org has huge list), there are many huge global network providers (Cogent, for example) that are unable to connect any edge point to fastmail servers. This is a massive global issue for Fastmail and I don't think they are handling it well.
- divbzero 3y agoFastmail webmail and IMAP over cellular is working for me, but IMAP over landline has been failing since last night.
- g105b 3y agoWhat is the fail rate compared to Gmail?
- Amfy 3y agoit's actually quite high. Been a long customer of fastmail, overall very happy. but they do have quite many multi hour outages in the last 1-2yrs.
- 93po 3y agoI used to advocate for fastmail but honestly, it's been awful for me. I had to go back to gmail. Fastmail isn't able to consistently deliver and receive emails, and it cost me a very good job once. More than half of the "verify email address" or "one time PIN" emails don't make it to my inbox anymore and I have to use my gmail address instead. Some platforms just flat out can't send me any emails at all. Multiple occasions of people just flat out not receiving my email, not even in a spam folder. I had a brief period where if I had an important email I'd send it from both fastmail and my gmail to make sure it was delivered. I just gave up and went back to gmail. The state of email is really frustrating and it's not fastmail's fault I don't think, it' more likely google's fault.
- s__s 3y agoI’ve been looking to get off gmail, and fast mail was a main contender, but this is rather alarming.
- crimsonpowder 3y agoOn the contrary, fastmail is usually the fastest for me in terms of delivering mail and has never failed. I get all PINs and verify emails.
- tgvaughan 3y agoNot working from Switzerland.
- pif 3y agoI can confirm. Not working since this morning; it's 15:16 now.
- _joel 3y agoWorking fine for me atm
- KevinGlass 3y agoWorking for me also. Seems to be one of the rare cases where the “down for some people” in a status page actually does mean “some”. Recently when Microsoft 365 was offline for all email services they reported it as a “limited degradation”.
- calvinmorrison 3y agofastmailstatus is updated by humans
- lolinder 3y agoSo are most big-tech status pages, which is why they often fail to report the outage for a long time.
- wryoak 3y agoYeah the status says “partial service degradation” but the title lured me in with its encompassing “down”
- michaelbuckbee 3y agoSame.
- masfuerte 3y agoNot working from the UK. My packets meander around several cloudflare servers in London and then give up. Also, does nobody configure reverse dns these days?
- Jgrubb 3y agoWhen one wakes up to no new emails, one knows there is a disturbance in the force. Thanks for the explanation.
- Jgrubb 3y agoOk, it's been long enough now to start to be concerning.
- nvr219 3y agoWorking for me, I must be in the blessed data center.
- johnmoberg 3y agoIt's been completely down for me in Sweden since this morning (8 hours and counting), but it works fine when using a VPN to US servers.
- LinuxBender 3y agoWorks from US Mountain West. Looks like their /24 is announced by Cloudflare [1][2] and that may be having routing issues in the EU and parts of the US?. Having my old 1keyes account would be useful but CF does show up in their public dashboard [3]. [1] - https://bgp.he.net/net/103.168.172.0/24#_netinfo https://bgp.he.net/net/103.168.172.0/24#_netinfo [2] - https://bgp.tools/prefix/103.168.172.0/24#connectivity https://bgp.tools/prefix/103.168.172.0/24#connectivity [3] - https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/
- malnourish 3y agoNot working in US Central
- dasil003 3y agoIt’s working for me in US central (southern MN)
- malnourish 3y agoOdd, I'm not that far from you. traceroute app.fastmail.com (103.168.172.38), [...] 7 4.1.86.34 (4.1.86.34) 4.341 ms 4.247 ms 4.909 ms 8 162.158.212.112 (162.158.212.112) 4.297 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 4.217 ms 162.158.212.109 (162.158.212.109) 4.265 ms 9 162.158.212.109 (162.158.212.109) 4.176 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 4.434 ms 162.158.212.113 (162.158.212.113) 4.355 ms 10 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 5.616 ms 162.158.212.106 (162.158.212.106) 4.337 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 5.882 ms 11 * * * 12 * * * 13 * * * [...]
- LinuxBender 3y agoThat's also Cloudflare [1]. I guess we must wait and see if any of the CF employees here on HN have any theories. They are probably busy troubleshooting. [1] - https://bgp.he.net/ip/162.158.212.94 https://bgp.he.net/ip/162.158.212.94
- 3y ago
- andyjohnson0 3y agoWorking for me here in the uk.
- mdrzn 3y agoIt's been fully working in Italy for the last 6 hrs, no downtime noticed.
- moffkalast 3y ago"Move fast and break things."
- injb 3y agoYou can hardly characterize fastmail this way. They've been extremely stable in the years that I've been using them. In fact this is the first time I remember seeing a mention of fastmail on HN that wasn't praise.
- moffkalast 3y agoWell aside from literally their name of course.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYou should explicitly cancel the reseller accounts, because if you don't then it wouldn't lapse, despite it was explicitly set not to draw from the main account. Their mobile app is just a wrapper around their site, it does have no offline capabilities. Their mobile app requires GApps to receive notifications, because Firebase. Ie no notifications on de-googled phones. They would silently kill your account if their automated gearhead would think you are sending anything remotely resembling automated messages (that was a big ouch). (too lazy to check if this is still a thing, with fronted mails they could had fixed it) You still can get an original mailbox name if you are sending from an identity of that mailbox. Yes, they are rarely down, your support questions would be answered by a real humans (though not at your convienient time, so expect days to solve issues; probably should had added that into the list) but if you use it a bit more than a personal (or a business individual) account you are on the shallow grounds.
- ESchack 3y agoWorks from Denmark. Tracing route to app.fastmail.com [103.168.172.53] over a maximum of 30 hops: ... 6 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms ae0-0.alb2nqp8.dk.ip.tdc.net [83.88.19.117] 7 * * * Request timed out. 8 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 162.158.133.45 9 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 162.158.133.72 10 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 162.158.133.37 11 * * * Request timed out. 12 94 ms 93 ms 93 ms www.fastmail.fm [103.168.172.53]
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI think this is the first time they’ve had down time that I’ve noticed in almost ten years. I’m sure it happens more… It’s never an issue for me, though. It’s really nice.
- iKlsR 3y agoSame sentiment after 4 years, also mine is still working so go figure, very happy with the service.
- atomicnumber3 3y agoEmail delivery is also one of those interesting things where even small amounts of downtime are tolerated because email is treated as an unreliable protocol. Must be a bit more comfortable to be in that biz. Although I guess also that means your business involves making customers happy on an unreliable protocol. So maybe it's about the same overall then...
- upofadown 3y agoNot so much unreliable as asynchronous. SMTP is a better late than never sort of a protocol.
- 8organicbits 3y agoWebsites that perform login via a magic link sent via email: take notice. These sites have broken login when email is slow.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoThat’s a great insight that I hadn’t considered before. Are you familiar with what the failure mode is like with these systems? I’m assuming the login link shows up eventually, but not immediately?
- 8organicbits 3y agoIf we're talking about a five minute delay in email, the user may get bored of waiting and decide not to log in. If we're talking an hour long delay, the link in the email may be expired and won't work any longer. I think I've seen email links that expire as quickly as 15 minutes. It's possible some mail servers would have very short retry windows, so if your mail server was offline briefly a sending server could give up trying and fail the delivery. For a login link that expires quickly, it's probably not worth retrying for several hours or days.
- inray 3y agoNot working from Greece.
- outcoldman 3y agoJust woke up to this. Florida. Does not work over SMTP or FastMail iOS app, but I can open FastMail over the web from the browser. And it seems like I got some new mail, so not sure if some other mail was bounced. I have been using FastMail close to 10 years now (based on my blog post I wrote in may of 2014 about moving from Gmail to FastMail). I don't remember that big and long outage for those years. Which raises a concern for me: - I don't like how they handled it, the latest update is 4 hours ago https://twitter.com/fastmail https://twitter.com/fastmail, they mentioned "We're in close communication with our provider", which probably means it is not their fault, but the ISP. - Are they just too small, and it is just more likely to happen to them, comparing to GSuite or Outlook? For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages At this point FastMail is down for more than 7 hours. - I feel like a lot of companies might move to other providers after this. As I see a lot of people complain on twitter, and don't see any responses from Fastmail team. I am sure people will be unhappy. Kind of worries me. I am not ready to move away from FastMail. But if I will have to, the only option I see right now is Apple Mail with custom domains. But I feel like I am using so many mail customizations, and not sure if Apple Mail can even support all of them.
- mechhacker 3y agoIn a similar situation/location. But can't access it through my home internet, but my phone is just fine if I turn off wifi. This is funny because I was still getting push notifications, I just couldn't read them with my phone connected to the home router. They've been brilliant otherwise. Able to import everything from gmail very easily.
- fprotthetarball 3y ago> But can't access it through my home internet, but my phone is just fine if I turn off wifi. Thanks for the tip. I can't access it via my home provider, but T-Mobile works. Interestingly enough, I'm getting new email notifications on my home provider; I just can't read the mail through it. They're probably using an unaffected Google service for notifications.
- 3y ago
- brightball 3y agoStripe seems to be having issues this morning too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534590
- ubermonkey 3y agoI use Fastmail and only found out about the outage here; my overnight mail volume seems about normal. I'm a very happy Fastmail user.
- trillic 3y agoCan concur. Everything looks normal, I slept through the outage but seems like everything that should be there is there.
- isykt 3y agoEmail is not a critical communication for me, so an occasional outage doesn’t bother me. It happens.
- alberth 3y agoUnexpected outages inevitably happen. I'll just say that over the years, Fastmail has always over delivered. I'm a continued happy customer.
- submeta 3y agoTo all skeptics: For upwards of six years, I've been a happy user of Fastmail. My experience as a customer has been nothing short of excellent. Its wealth of features – including numerous alias names, concealed email addresses, customizable domains, and its notably swift customer service – all come with a modest price tag. I believe it's worth every cent and represents outstanding value for money. Edit: I must clarify, though, that I have no affiliation with Fastmail - my endorsement is purely a reflection of my positive user experience.
- stereoradonc 3y ago15 years here. This is the third time in my time period that it has been down. I have zero incentive to move to anything else.
- 0xfai 3y agoI think gmail has been out more than three times in the last 15 years. I remember in like 2013ish was the first gmail outage I remember and it was so shocking that everyone just left the office. heh. I've been trying to fully degoogle for six years. It's hard. I was an early GHA adopter and have multiple domains and stuff. That journey is finally wrapping up and FastMail has been a fantastic solution for me as I inch closer to self hosting. I've been very happy to give them money.
- outcoldman 3y agoI actually think they don't charge us enough. I am paying ~240 for 3 years, so that is 80 a year, less than $7 per month. I would pay a higher price for this service. Especially if that will allow them to add more durability for ISP :D
- bachmeier 3y agoMaybe open a couple extra accounts that you don't use so you can pay more. As much as I like Fastmail (been using them for a long time) there's only so much I'll pay for a service I can get for free elsewhere. If they're not making a healthy profit at the current prices, they're doing something wrong. I don't think I've ever experienced an outage, either, including today.
- paxys 3y agoThis thread seems astroturfed to hell. We are talking about a service outage and the comments are all the equivalent of glowing fake Amazon reviews.
- nerdbert 3y agoI'm a real person, been a fastmail customer for almost two decades, and it's one of the very few companies that I cheerfully evangelize for. They provide all the features I need, plenty of configurability, and it's very reliable (this morning notwithstanding). Doesn't at all surprise me that other people are chiming in to say similar things.
- jafitc 3y agobecause people use it for 10+ years and never experienced outage? it's there to give your perspective add me to happy customers
- COGlory 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html >Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
- vamega 3y agoI’m not affiliated with them in any way beyond being a customer. I work at a giant tech company, and the only money I’ve ever received from fastmail was a referral credit when one friend signed up for their service. I’m a very happy customer, and feel compelled to speak up when they have a one off incident. It helps readers know this isn’t common, and that the negative title can be counter-balanced by customer anecdotes.
- lolinder 3y agoFastmail just has a lot of very happy customers around here. I saw this post and my first thought was to come and show solidarity.
- 3y ago
- mildavw 3y agoDown for me on the US West Coast for 9 hours now. Love the service and it's been rock solid for over a decade for me. I do understand the concern with the lack communication with this outage, however. It's a bit of an organizational/leadership red flag when a crucial service business like this doesn't communicate with its customers when things go south.
- the_svd_doctor 3y agoWorks in the Bay Area for me. Agree that communication isn't great.
- classichasclass 3y agoDoing OK here (California).
- stavros 3y agoI don't care, this is the first time I've heard of it being down in years, and I didn't even notice. They've been so great, that they can have a lot more downtime than this before I'll even be annoyed.
- metabagel 3y agoI switched from GMail to iCloud, because I didn’t want Google hovering up my emails into their advertising business. I reluctantly switched from iCloud to FastMail, because iCloud’s alias feature wasn’t fully functioning. I love FastMail and wholeheartedly recommend it. I guess I have used it for about 5 years.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoWould you mind sharing a detailed review (guessing you used with your domain) of iCloud? As in catch all, sending from different addresses on your domain etc? Last time I checked the latter didn't work at all - is that what you meant by alias?
- pluijzer 3y agoDoesn't work for me in the Netherlands. Down since this morning. Though I used Tor and could access it via an IP in Ghana. I have new emails so I am pretty sure they keep arriving. I share the positive sentiment about Fastmail here. Using it close to 10 years without issues. The times I needed there support for some more complex configuration question and they replied thoroughly and quickly. I normally dislike web interfaces but their UI is really well done.
- Zr40 3y ago> Doesn't work for me in the Netherlands. Down since this morning. Same for me. It is accessible from my home network (AS206238) and from public transport wifi (AS202189), but not from any other network I can currently access (AS201975, AS50266).