server crash?

Airtable is currently experiencing an outage. We hope to be fully recovered soon, but you can follow along at status.airtable.com for updates!

Destroyed an important zoom :-/

Impacted the non-profit public-facing Camellia Festival. :-/

Business (and personal) completely knocked out all day. Really makes you rethink tools and work methods.

Hey ​@Heather_Hale, we sincerely apologize for the disruption on Friday. We recognize how important Airtable is to your work and understand the impact interruptions like this can have.

If you notice any lingering issues, please contact the Airtable Support Team at support@airtable.com.
Thank you for your understanding!

The timing couldn’t’ve been worse. ;-/

I had just trained a dozen Master Gardener Senior Citizens how to use Airtable to inventory our 1,400 Camellia Trees at the Botanical Gardens - with many of them expressing genuine concern that we risked “losing everything” if it was “just in the cloud” - and straight out of the gate - DAY ONE - ON THE DAY (the most important/active/PUBLIC DAY of the year! ;-/ ) Airtable is INEXPLICABLY 100% DOWN & OUT.

For 5+ hours.

With the General Public touring the gardens. ;-/

And our Tour Guides with… yeah…

BLACK SCREENS

and ...

Spinning Wheels of Death

and … 

No back-up plan.

While - with egg on my face ;-/ I tried to defend Airtable - trying to come up with ANY REASON or EXPLANATION for WHY this happened - and convince them (and myself) that Airtable was actually “safe” - and that this “never happens” - and “wouldn’t (shouldn’t EVER) happen again” … while my stomach was doing flip flops internally scrambling for how much effort it was gonna be FOR ME ;-/ to move all this data to another platform. ;-/

LESSON LEARNED! ;-/

WHAT HAPPENED?!

How can we be assured it was a fluke?! >;-/

​@Heather_Hale I will say that this was the worse outage I can remember in over 5 years of using Airtable. Any other issues have always been limited to a specific feature or much more quickly remediated (and nothing comes to mind but I’m sure there have been a couple instances). 

I definitely get the feeling, and working with the public and trained seniors makes it all the worse (I utilized Airtable for years as a Museum Educator running docent tours, so I definitely get where you’re coming from). 

There are backup solutions, like OnTo Air Backups, or just occasionally downloading your base as .CSVs, and this was an excellent reminder to not let those practices lapse (very easy to do, myself included).

One thing I want to include here is that for anyone using Fillout+Airtable, go check your integration status. The outage also made me re-sync my integrations, and I was having folks tell me about broken forms this morning. 

We hear you! Airtable’s internal teams are conducting a thorough post-incident review and will be implementing additional safeguards to ensure this type of disruption does not recur. We take reliability seriously, and last week fell short of our standard. This work is part of a broader effort to improve the performance and stability of our platform, and these lessons will shape how we execute going forward.

Thank you, ​@DisraeliGears01.

​@GCheung, thank you, too. Still love to know what caused it.