6 ms·
Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days
- draw_down 6mo ago[dead]
- colechristensen 6mo ago:( I really like Tindie and what they're doing
- iamnothere 6mo agoThere are a number of things on Tindie that I have been unable to find anywhere else at any price. (Mostly small batch bespoke electronics.) I hope they figure this out.
- sixothree 6mo agoAs much as people want to be angry about this happening, the value of the thing to the maker community is too great. I hope they can figure this out.
- kordlessagain 6mo agoWho is Tindie?
- dlgeek 6mo agoIt's like Etsy for small-scale electronics - if you build a cool, niche electronic device as an individual, Tindie is a marketplace to sell in low volume (possibly as a kit).
- dust42 6mo agoTinder for indie (hardware) devs and their customers. I.e. a webshop for indie devs who sell small series of niche hardware.
- Retr0id 6mo agoI don't have the links handy but I believe there are some comments from staff on social media that give more details. Edit: https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116427447318102919 https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116427447318102919 https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116436988752373293 https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116436988752373293
- the_biot 6mo agoYou have to wonder why it's so hard to put that on their 503 error page. I suspect something's much more broken than they're letting on.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- JohnMakin 6mo agoThis would indicate wherever they were hosting their site on no longer exists. 503's even on pages that should mostly be static suggest the backend no longer exists, or whatever ingress they're using in front of it disappeared. As far as I can tell every single page on their site is 503'ing. Example of a response I see: < x-cache: Error from cloudfront < via: 1.1 bdf85d6d4811ab08c57841855a848f8a.cloudfront.net (CloudFront) < x-amz-cf-pop: LAX54-P11 < x-amz-cf-id: nTQ-y1Ut3F-04jUCDM09ordCtj0CMkVmmtZTe__BtzEr1sMJu7rKaw== < age: 76773
- pseudohadamard 6mo agoSpeculating wildly, they got pwned and are having to rebuild the site from barely-existent out-of-date backups? As others have pointed out, a failed migration doesn't take you out for this long, you should be able to roll back unless your migration plan was "reformat and reinstall".
- Aurornis 6mo agoThe maker people I know have been migrating away from Tindie because it has felt like a sinking ship for a long time. I really like the idea of Tindie so I hope they can succeed. I don’t understand what sequence of events led to this being such a large problem that they can’t even keep their site online. The post says something vague about the engineering team is hoping the migration work is close to finished, but it’s been years since I remember any engineering team knocking out the entire site for days without being able to restore it during a failed migration. Are they outsourcing dev work to the type of agency that bills by the hour and perpetually churns low hourly cost work to make their money in volume fixing their own code?
- chromacity 6mo agoUnfortunate. Tindie is (was?) a pretty unique marketplace. Amusingly, a lot of what they were selling was probably illegal due to FCC rules: for the most part, you can't sell electronics without EMI certification and "I'm just a hobbyist" is not an excuse. Kits get a bit of leeway, but finished products don't. Before the tariffs, I noticed that Chinese companies were trying to undercut them. I've gotten multiple mails asking me to start selling my designs with China-based outlets: they would make the PCBs, assemble them, and pay me some money for every item sold.
- dbl000 6mo agoCan you share more information about the undercutting? I've heard of places like Elecrow trying to incentivize people to sell via their platform/OEM service but it sounds like you've had people asking you to license your designs?
- chromacity 6mo agoI never followed up, but I didn't read it as some serious IP licensing thing. It sounded like they've come to the conclusion that they're making the stuff that's sold on Tindie anyway, so might as well set up a website and ship directly to your customers.
- the_axiom 6mo agoFree market is a good thing.
- Permik 6mo agoIt's good until some unregulated electronic device creates interference that makes some poor guys pacemaker act up and kills them.
- EtienneDeLyon 6mo agoAs a RF expert, I can assure you that is not possible. And basic common sense should tell you why. It's AM radio that gets interfered with.
- NDlurker 6mo agoI've bought some cool stuff off Tindie. My latest purchase was this set of earrings that alert when you're near a Flock camera https://colonelpanic.tech/#products https://colonelpanic.tech/#products
- rozab 6mo agoThis really tickled me, I wasn't expecting them to just be a pair of esp32 dev boards you attach to your ears
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dbl000 6mo agoAbout Sunday/Monday last week right before it went down I noticed the site was supper buggy and failing to add things to cart, I emailed support and got a "we are checking the issue". Since it went down all I've heard from support is "Please be patient. Tindie will be back up soon as we are currently performing maintenance. At this time, we do not have an estimated timeframe to provide." The fact that it wasn't communicated at all prior and not having a timeframe makes me thing this was probably an ops screw up.
- ottah 6mo agoI see this a lot with small independent sites with big userbases. Instead of being honest, they hide mistakes behind maintenance or blame it on hackers.
- leros 6mo agoThey must have really bungled something if they can't roll back and get the site operational again.
- ottah 6mo agoConcerning, a professional development team should have been able to manage this switch with minimal to no downtime. Makes me wonder what other mistakes they're making. I'm reluctant to trust my payment information with them in the future.
- eterm 6mo agoNot everyone has seamless blue/green deployment. However, any downtime over an hour or two screams "migration gone wrong" to me. Otherwise wouldn't you just roll back to get the site up to come back at it and try again later?
- mattmanser 6mo agoIn this day and age all it takes is one person who knows what they're doing. That means they've got zero people who know what they're doing.
- gedy 6mo agoSo many fairly popular apps, SaaS, etc are on skeleton crew staffing-levels. It'll probably get worse with vibe coding. Though then they'll probably launch Claude Ops, etc now that I think about it.
- systems_glitch 6mo agoYeah this sucks, I have a bunch of hobbyist orders stuck in limbo since last week -- customers have paid, but I can't pull the orders down even through the API. I really like Tindie as a platform and have been using it since nearly the beginning...but I'd have lost the contract if I pulled this level of nonsense on a customer's production application.
- sd9 6mo ago> The goal of the current maintenance is to fix a lot of long-standing issues with the site. The underlying infrastructure was getting very fragile as technical debt accumulated over time. A team is working very hard right now to make sure that once the site is back up, it's on much better footing and will be solid and reliable for the long term. Despite the unfortunate amount of time this is taking, it will be a major benefit to the site in the long run. If I were a developer there I would be feeling really not very good. Just minutes of downtime on the systems I’ve worked on gets my heart rate going. It also feels like there’s a lot being left unsaid in this statement. Normally you would work on these things in parallel to production… so something is seriously wrong.
- mey 6mo agoThe scenarios I have taken extended downtime for. When an OLTP's DB needed a serious overhaul for some reason and it was cheaper for rollout to plan operational downtime than risk loosing data or inconsistent transactions. Generational platform migration to complete system rewrites (something I am generally against, but that is its own soapbox). Migrating from on-prem to cloud infra, which required design changes. In all cases data integrity/consistency is the critical aspect. Migrating from one db technology to another (MySQL -> PostgreSQL). In all those cases there is serious planning done before the migration, checklists, trial runs/validations, and validation procedures day off. If something isn't working, the leadership group evaluates the the issue and determines rollback vs go forward. Rollback needs to also be planned for, and your planned downtime window should be considered. I agree with you, this wording implies they are making changes after this change. This could've been bad planning, a bad call day off, etc. In one scenario, we _had_ to go forward while resolving several blockers on the fly. We had planned ahead of time developer rotation shifts. Pulling people off the line after 8-12hrs. At some point, you aren't thinking clearly understress. Don't know how big the team is over there is, but I hope they are pacing themselves, during what I am sure is a horrible moment of crisis to them. My advice to them is, consider a roll back if needed/possible. Split responsibility between who is managing the process and dealing with specific problems. Focus on MVP. Don't try to _fix_ and replace at the same time, if something was broken before business wise, log it in your bug tracker and deal with it later. Pull people away if needed to get rest. Get upper management away from people doing the work, have them only talking to the group handling the process management. Edit: I am also making a good faith assumption that this is planned and not an emergency response, either way, it doesn't change my general advice.
- ZephyrBlu 6mo agoScheduled maintenance in 2026 is insane
- ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo agoThe biggest that comes to mind would be Steam.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoBlizzard still brings World of Warcraft down every Tuesday for maintenance. It's down right now to apply a new content patch, which they estimated would take 8 hours. https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/help/article/358479 https://us.support.blizzard.com/en/help/article/358479
- tecleandor 5mo agoAnd yet, banks do it all the time, even daily. And I very well remember when Rackspace took down their object storage for weeks in their London zone, because they ran out of hard drives.
- fortyseven 6mo agoGlad I used a privacy.com burner when I bought from them. Quite a while later I found a declined purchased for pizza on the now long-deactivated burner card I used to purchase through them.
- luma 6mo agoThe site has been on life support for a decade, ownership has changed hands a few times, basic features promised 10 years ago never shipped, API is half implemented (eg. you can download an order but you cannot mark it shipped), and they still have no mechanism to collect state sales tax nor will they submit a 1090 as required by US tax law. I jumped ship 5 years ago when this became too much of a problem and not a single thing has changed in those 5 years. Tindie was a great place for a hacker to sell a few widgets back in the day, but legal requirements have changed since then but Tindie has not changed a line of code in at least 10 years.
- tecleandor 5mo agoWhere are you selling from now?
- luma 5mo agoetsy, mostly for lack of a better option and a lack of desire to self host, deal with taxes, etc.
- shrubble 6mo agoIf you didn’t inform people ahead of time, it’s probably not “scheduled”…
- kibwen 6mo agoScheduledn't maintenance.
- jasonjmcghee 6mo agoI wonder if someone found an exploit of some sort and they are figuring out how to prevent it? Either that or catastrophic data issues? Otherwise so much downtime at once is pretty crazy
- piraccini 5mo agoApparently Tindie has "new owners". https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116456471027394692 https://hackaday.social/@tindie/116456471027394692