Dropbox status: access issues and outage reports

Problems in the last 24 hours

The graph below depicts the number of Dropbox reports received over the last 24 hours by time of day. When the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line, an outage is determined.

Most Reported Problems

The following are the most recent problems reported by Dropbox users through our website.

• Errors (50%)
• Sign in (33%)
• Website Down (17%)

Live Outage Map

The most recent Dropbox outage reports came from the following cities:

City	Problem Type	Report Time
Bournemouth	Sign in	1 month ago
Paramaribo	Errors	2 months ago
Bogotá	Website Down	2 months ago
Auxerre	Errors	2 months ago
Salt Lake City	Sign in	2 months ago
Madrid	Errors	3 months ago

Full Outage Map

Community Discussion

Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.

Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.

Dropbox Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  ぱんじろう(・ー・)？ (@CopenPanjiro) reported 2 minutes ago

  On Essentials plan. Ticket #26375062 top support evades the core issue by vaguely blaming my PC environment. I've already verified registry & OS. Stop dismissing verified technical logs and escalate this bug to the dev engineering team now. @DropboxSupport

• 
  Shripal Gandhi (@ishripalgandhi) reported 11 minutes ago

  Hey @Dropbox ... Your advanced customer service is horrible! I have benefit chasing them for an important issue since more than 2 days (not counting the weekend) now and I still do not have a resolution. Is it that your reps are allowed to answer only one email per client per day??

• 
  Om Modi (@ocmodi21) reported 13 minutes ago

  When people ask why companies like Uber, Twitch, Dropbox, and many startups use Go for backend services... The answer isn't just performance. Go was designed to solve many of the problems microservices introduce. Let's break it down. 🧵

• 
  Molly O’Shea (@MollySOShea) reported 13 minutes ago

  BREAKING: Merge Launches ‘Agent Handler’ Control AI Access, Tokenmaxxed $$$ Bills, & Stop Mass Data Leaks "We don't trust agents" "The second you connect it to tools, that's where everything goes wrong." OpenAI. Perplexity. Netflix. Uber. Mistral. Dropbox. JPMorgan.. all quietly run on @merge_api Co-Founders CEO @Shensi Ding & CTO @GilFeig dive into it all We cover: - MASSIVE AI Security scares are just starting - Tokenmaxxing bills - Agent Handler - Gateway routing - Winning enterprise logos - The SaaSpocalypse 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Shensi Ding & Gil Feig, Co-Founders at Merge (01:04) Three products. One big bet (03:20) How Merge made the AI pivot (04:42) The Classic Innovator’s Dilemma (05:58) Building culture around AI (07:10) The leverage nobody’s talking about (08:52) Codex vs Claude Code (09:15) The scale nobody knew about (09:47) SaaS, Finance, and the Biggest AI Labs (10:46) Why AI companies buy differently (12:04) What AI sales actually looks like (13:04) The Fastest sales cycles in the market (14:35) Why is Cybersecurity broken (15:59) Merge's solution to agent security (19:16) Mythos, Wiz, and the GitHub Hack (22:34) 1,000 Bot signups in one hour (23:23) Real reason companies pay ransom to hackers (25:43) The State of AI Infrastructure Costs (26:41) Internal AI Governance is the next big problem (29:28) Most Popular Integrations on Merge (30:54) Big Giants are planning big moves (31:54) What does Salesforce going headless exactly mean (33:41) Agents don’t need a UI anymore (36:59) Can this AI generation actually adapt (38:25) What Merge looks for in talent (41:25) The SaaSpocalypse is real (45:03) Are AI valuations actually insane? (47:11) How Merge landed OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix & Uber (49:02) The Metrics that actually drive the business (49:58) Biggest misconceptions in tech right now (51:55) The market is finally catching up to Merge

• 
  pharmabro (@pharmabro0782) reported 14 minutes ago

  @Ronalfa @draparente @liambai21 a “rock engineer” at Dropbox is an engineer, an RA doesn’t have the degree (undergrad/ masters at best). Now this is different at large pharma where RAs can stay for much, much longer time with structured career development (slow but existent).

• 
  Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) reported 15 minutes ago

  Well this is ironic: Ironic: been recommending a resume service built by an ex-Dropbox eng for years (a side project, but a good one.) Dev pivoted to building an AI Engineer - fine! But now resume site is down. Customers billed. Support nonexistent. AI made it... a lot worse!

• 
  Elias Al (@iam_elias1) reported 15 minutes ago

  8/ The settings on your own devices that are silently eating bandwidth. Even with a great router, fast DNS, and honest ISP speeds, your devices may be consuming bandwidth you didn't authorize. Common culprits: On your phone: 1. iCloud/Google Photos backup set to sync constantly (not just on Wi-Fi) 2. App updates downloading in the background 3. "Wi-Fi Assist" on iPhone (silently switches to cellular and back, disrupting connections) On your laptop: 1. Cloud sync services (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive) uploading constantly 2. Windows/macOS pushing system updates during peak hours 3. Browser tabs running in background consuming bandwidth with auto-refresh On your smart TV: 4. Firmware updates downloading during prime streaming time 5. Multiple streaming apps running in background 6. ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) sending screenshots to servers every 15-60 seconds On IoT devices: 1. Smart cameras uploading video 24/7 2. Smart speakers maintaining constant server connections 3. Smart home hubs polling every device every few seconds She audited every device on her network. Twelve devices were consuming bandwidth she didn't know about. Three of them were using more data than her actual streaming.

• 
  Siddiqui Qamar ֎ (@siddqamar_ai) reported 16 minutes ago

  "it's just a wrapper" 😑 might be one of the laziest criticism in tech! users don't care whether you built the infrastructure. they care whether the product solves their problem. dropbox didn't invent storage. it made storage effortless. turns out making existing technology usable is a lot more valuable than many founders want to admit.

• 
  Adam (@aclater) reported 23 minutes ago

  Hey @FedEx @fedexhelp - you've got the wrong address on a dropbox in alexandria, and I keep getting your angry customers and packages. Happy to work together to fix it? I can DM details.

• 
  Néstor Planes (@NestorPlanes) reported 25 minutes ago

  Ben Thompson about The Consumer Market: "This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if someone signed up with your referral code, you got more storage — and grew extremely fast amongst consumers; the company then spent too long trying to actually build a business in the consumer space, before finally realizing that the only way to make money with what was ultimately a productivity product was by selling to enterprise. The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. The fact that Silicon Valley forgets this is downstream from Silicon Valley being a bubble; normal people aren’t looking for agents to buy them tickets to a concert. Still, the bubble was strong enough to convince OpenAI to make the exact same mistake Dropbox did: the company somehow convinced itself that it could make enough money selling subscriptions to consumers; Anthropic, meanwhile, realized that it was enterprises who were willing to pay for AI’s massive productivity benefits, even as OpenAI failed to capitalize on their consumer market penetration by refusing to build an advertising product. This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that Apple’s agentic shortcomings are a big deal, at least for now. Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don’t want to work or care about being productive. What they do want to do is watch short-form video, and an iPhone is simply much better at that than any other device ever will be; in that context, Siri being good enough is enough, and it appears that Apple crossed that bar."

• 
  QuixoticMoose (@QuixoticMoose) reported 26 minutes ago

  Bricks & Minifigs LEGO Drama: Unredacted Police Footage Raises Serious Questions About Cop-Business Ties Hey everyone, it's been a wild ride since my last piece on the Bricks and Minifigs mess. What started as a story about a family trying to sell their massive Star Wars LEGO collection has turned into something much uglier. With the unredacted bodycam and dashcam footage from American Fork Police now out there, we are seeing a side of this that looks a lot like police getting way too cozy with the business they were supposed to investigate fairly. The Footage Drop That Blew It Open Just recently, someone got hold of a big batch of unredacted videos from the American Fork PD. It was apparently an accidental public Dropbox link, but once it was out, it spread fast. These are the full versions of the interactions that were shown in heavily edited form before. And man, they paint a pretty concerning picture. In the clips, you see Bricks and Minifigs people like store owner Joshua Johnson and CEO Ammon McNeff talking to officers. They throw out some heavy claims against Reckless Ben. Things like extortion, death threats, collusion with the Mansells, and even making up documents. The police seem to eat it up without much pushback right there on camera. It feels like they are taking the company's word as solid fact. Signs of Too Close for Comfort One part that stands out is when an officer mentions personal connections. He talks about being friends with the Airbnb host where Reckless Ben and his crew were staying before that swatting mess. The officer even sounds like he is bragging about it on bodycam. That kind of casual chat makes you wonder if private relationships played into how aggressively they went after Ben. There is also talk between American Fork officers and other departments, including LAPD. It looks like McNeff and his team were pushing multiple police forces to go after Reckless Ben. The footage shows officers coordinating in ways that feel more like helping a business protect itself than handling a neutral investigation. The arrest of Reckless Ben gets shown in more detail too. What some saw as a traffic stop turns into a long vehicle search over supposed drugs that never seemed to pan out. Critics are calling the whole thing disproportionate, like the police were there to send a message rather than enforce clear laws. The earlier redacted videos hid a lot of this flow, but now we can see it all. The Community Reaction and the Mormon Angle LEGO fans and true crime watchers online have been tearing this apart. Threads on Reddit and YouTube breakdowns are full of people saying it looks like the department acted as private security for Bricks and Minifigs. Some point to the shared LDS Church ties between officers, Johnson, McNeff, and others as a possible reason for the protective vibe. I am not saying it is a full conspiracy, but the optics are not great in a tight knit place like American Fork. Public trust in the police handling here has taken a real hit. The department put out statements defending their actions as responses to stalking complaints at Johnson's home. They say redactions were about protecting victims. But the full unredacted stuff has many questioning if that was the whole truth. Where Does This Leave the Mansells? Remember, at the heart of it all is still that elderly collector and his son who lost track of most of their $200,000 collection during the franchise handover. Bricks and Minifigs maintains they only inherited a tiny bit of inventory and that the original deal was not properly done. Lawsuits are moving forward, but the missing sets and money have not been explained to the Mansells' satisfaction. Reckless Ben's videos brought massive attention to their situation, including a GoFundMe that has helped with legal costs. His style is aggressive, sure, but the new footage makes it look like the pushback from the other side involved more than just legal channels. This scandal shows how fast a hobby dispute can drag in law enforcement and how important real transparency is. If police really did favor one business over a fair process, that is a big problem no matter what side you are on. The LEGO community thrives on trust and good deals. Right now, a lot of us are watching closely to see if the courts sort out the missing bricks and whether anyone holds the police accountable for how they handled this. It is not over yet, but these videos have definitely shifted the conversation. What do you think? Drop your takes below.

• 
  Paulius Eidukas (艾文) ☭ (@nilsenist) reported 28 minutes ago

  @RavenT1me Sorry about that! The hacked account asks to download a virus disguised as an "indie game". I've reported that both to Discord and Dropbox/GitHub/YouTube which help distribute the file. Hopefully that shuts down the hacker at least temporarily. Hope you get your account back!

• 
  Teja Punna (@punna_teja) reported 29 minutes ago

  Indian Government: "We've blocked Telegram to protect the NEET exam." The Internet: So the problem was... Telegram? Not the people selling fake papers? Not the organised scam networks? Not the thousands of mule bank accounts? Not the hundreds of disposable SIM cards? Not the fake payment gateways? Not the people exploiting students' panic and desperation? Solution: Block Telegram. Meanwhile: ✅ Discord still exists. ✅ WhatsApp still exists. ✅ Signal still exists. ✅ Slack still exists. ✅ Email still exists. ✅ Google Drive still exists. ✅ Dropbox still exists. ✅ OneDrive still exists. ✅ iMessage still exists. ✅ Bluetooth still exists. ✅ AirDrop still exists. ✅ The entire web still exists. Scammers: "No problem. See you tomorrow on another platform." Meanwhile, millions of legitimate users who rely on Telegram for: College and study groups Open-source communities Cybersecurity research Software development Startups and businesses Education and learning News and information sharing are left wondering what they did wrong. The platform changes. The abuse doesn't. Target the criminals. Not the communication tools.

• 
  Harman (@itsharmanjot) reported 38 minutes ago

  Open source NotebookLM alternative with no data limits and AI agents. Same idea as Google's NotebookLM. Same chat-with-your-docs. Same podcast generator. Same cited answers. Except this one has no source limit, no notebook limit, no 200MB file cap, and no Google login. It's called SurfSense. Google NotebookLM vs SurfSense: - Sources per notebook: 50 to 600 → Unlimited - File size cap: 200MB and 500K words → No limit - LLM choice: Gemini only → 100+ models via LiteLLM - Local LLMs: Not allowed → Full Ollama and vLLM support - Self-host: No → Yes, one Docker command - Price: $0, $19.99/mo Pro, or $249.99/mo Ultra → $0 forever Here's the wildest part: It connects to 27+ sources Google can't touch. Notion. Slack. Linear. Jira. GitHub. Discord. Dropbox. OneDrive. Gmail. Confluence. Obsidian. ClickUp. Microsoft Teams. Airtable. Your entire work life, indexed once, searchable from one chat box. 14.4K GitHub stars. 1.4K forks. 6,232 commits. Apache-2.0 license. One honest note: the README says it's not yet production-ready and still being actively developed. But it already does more than NotebookLM does, and the gap is widening every release. This is what NotebookLM should have been from the start. Repo in the first comment.

• 
  Anna Bubbly 🌺✨ (@AnnaBubblyMV) reported 38 minutes ago

  Is uploading on Clips4Sale not working for anyone else? I can only get it to work if I do it through Dropbox, the usual upload button isn’t working

• 
  meshgear (@_meshgear) reported 40 minutes ago

  @Dropbox It is not working.

• 
  Eusebiu Balan (@BalanEusebiu) reported 41 minutes ago

  @gezimqaili been on dropbox for years, never let me down honestly

• 
  ṢƘĪÑlÖVẸ́R̃ṢX🇺🇲🌷 (@skinloversx) reported 42 minutes ago

  Hey Daddy I'm down for FaceTime 💧 Dropbox and all kind of nasty content message me for menu 💦💦 #md

• 
  Karus Daedlyn *Cat Dad Era* (@CDaedlyn) reported 42 minutes ago

  @CantEverDie Keep making burner Gmail accounts and sign up for the free stuff. I jest, because that's terrible practice, although I did know an attorney IRL that would do that to daisy-chain those Dropbox sites. Infinite free storage, just in 2.5GB chunks.

• 
  Clawvard University (@clawvardEDU) reported 43 minutes ago

  A skill server is any endpoint an agent can point at to load skills. Sx 2.0's move is showing a Dropbox folder can be one. Drop a skill in, share the folder, teammates load it. No infra on the receiver's side.

• 
  Sahil Handa (@sahilhandapanda) reported 44 minutes ago

  I'm convinced this kind of environment-setting is even more important online. The digital equivalent of swapping a cassette in a studio is stopping to go hunt down a file in Dropbox or Drive.

• 
  J. (@munchivelo) reported 46 minutes ago

  track back to just over a year to now. i'd built an automated ecommerce flow that took a whole store end to end. seo would research trends, products, and map those into .js scripts which would launch prompts that read those research files. that would feed an image gen prompt which created designs, set to specific standard. i'd generate them, and then ANOTHER prompt, would check the images, score them with a criteria, and either move them to an accepted folder, or move them to an archive folder. the accepted folders, would automatically fire a script which would open photoshop, map the image to smart layers, in a 'product shot' template i'd made, and then export all of the final product shots to another folder, and then exported the flat designs which would be used for the products. another script took the product images, did visual lookups, generated all product descriptions, renamed the images and generated the seo text. it ran optimizations locally via a jpegoptim and oxipng script. it then uploaded them to dropbox, and via API, would generate a dropbox link map. i had one barebones csv template, which i'd run a ps1 script through to map json files into the csv rows, and insert the dropbox link map. all my images, links, followed the exact same slugs, so it turned 2 hours of manual work into a 5 second bulk rename and insert. it then converted that csv into json, which then itself converted that json into ld-json for product rich listings. ai would write the product description based on a dataseo keywords, and googletrends json file that would run on every product type. collecting keywords for that specific product. it also formed it around brand profiles, copy guides and other things. this was sonnet 3 days, GPT 4.0 days, and it STILL wrote great copy when it had the right guidance. in the .js file, i'd replace all em dashes with a hyphen if they ever appeared. i built a custom product uploader, built my own php plugin which synced to local .js files and connected via rest. it was (and still is) one of the best wc product uploaders that exist, as it completely resets filterlookups only for that product, and is lightning fast because i upload it directly into the sql from json. no importers or WC rest needed. the images would be uploaded via ftp, and then on detection, would sync those to the media library. it took what would be 3 hours of manual work, and congested it into a 2 minute image, to fully live product. after that, i'd export sales data, the ai was constantly learning, sales data feeding back to files, which would then teach the ai what products work, what doesn't. what copy worked, what copy didn't. all of it was local on my pc. i wasn't selling an saas. it was just something that worked for my very particular setup. i built that mostly with GPT 4.0 and a little bit of 3.5. copy and pasting the chats from chatGPT. all the plugins, the php, everything. then some of it got improved inside vscode back on the old original copilot plans. this was before n8n, before agents were even a thing. all of that was built for me, local, syncing folder to folder, json file to json file. python scripts watching files, and .ps1 files that would follow up with other .ps1 files, which launched .js files which contained prompts for AI, and hitting the openAI API's whenever I needed the AI layer. eventually i built a terminal tool, which would allow me to run the scripts from the terminal, and i'd manually type in the slugs for which products i wanted processed. all files would sit in specific folders, and scripts would do the rest. i was so excited about that, giving my terminal app a shortcut icon and putting it onto my taskbar. that was a year ago. fast forward to now. the game has changed so much. ANYTHING and i mean anything is possible now. i've had this ******* idea for so long, to build a fully automated, self learning ecom business, that launches products end to end based on it's own research, writing, and growth, but the complexity of it previously , and being busy with life, it never got finalized. and i've finally been building the replacement for it, but it'll be able to do many other things. i'll be able to run that exact same system, except this time through a full app, with a canvas, and agent systems instead of .ps1 scripts. not to say i won't run scripts; they're an integral part of any automated workflow, but now it has superpowers. not only that, but i moved away from woocommerce entirely. instead i just built my own website builder, which is fully automated end to end. my brand profiles, my artwork system? i'm still using those, just for more things. now i can launch 50 brands just like it, running the same system, all in about 5 minutes. except this time, a year later, we have GPT 2.0, and seedance. which offer MUCH better usage for ecommerce than it was back 1 year ago. i also built an ad builder. it takes my brands images, or generates images. i've got background removed, and full skills and agents which practically generate the ads for me. it mixes all that into seedance videos, and posts in logos etc. now i take those image/videos, and build instagram, tiktok, facebook vids, generate descriptions, and upload them automatically. that's why it's so great building for yourself. the amount of reusability you get with it, the fact it's free forever, can never be beaten. i'm not selling anything yet. but if you're interested in seeing how i think about automation, then stay a while and listen. the tool i'm building will absolutely help you too. but i'll be honest. i'm actually quite scared to release it, solely down to how powerful it is. not many people do it like i do, and i'm finally on here to tell the world.

• 
  Ayaan 🐧 (@twtayaan) reported 47 minutes ago

  Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that Dropbox was a feature, not a product. Dropbox is now worth $8 billion. In 2007 Drew Houston was a 24 year old MIT student who kept forgetting his USB drive. So he built Dropbox. Within a year Steve Jobs called him into Apple HQ. Apple wanted to buy Dropbox and shut it down. Houston said no. Jobs told him directly that Dropbox was a feature, not a product, and that Apple would build it themselves. Apple launched iCloud in 2011 specifically to kill Dropbox. It did not work. Dropbox crossed 100 million users in 2012. Then 200 million. Then 500 million. Apple tried again. iCloud Drive in 2014. Same result. Then the enterprise market shifted. Slack, Notion and Google Drive carved up Dropbox's user base from every direction. Revenue growth slowed. The stock dropped 50% from its IPO price. But Dropbox never died. Today 700 million people have used it. 17 million paying customers. $8 billion valuation. Still independent. Still running. Steve Jobs built a trillion dollar company. He called Dropbox a feature. The feature outlasted him and two attempts by Apple to replace it. Drew Houston never forgot his USB drive again.

• 
  𝔤𝔞𝔟𝔦 ♡ (@stucklikehoney) reported 49 minutes ago

  if I were to offer a lifetime dropbox, all of my content will go into it. I would add to it as I have new stuff. pictures and videos. pay one time. who would be down?

• 
  BadUncle (@BadUncleX) reported 49 minutes ago

  @mitsuhiko Similarly, I still use the old version before 7. They try to force you to bind to their server-dependent version. I prefer to use dropbox to synchronize.

• 
  markusdd (@markusdd5) reported 49 minutes ago

  I have the feeling - when I see who is posting this table over and over on here - that this is just a campaign so institutionals can get in cheaper. How am I remotely interested in the statistics within a 1 year window. (apart from the fact that there are many companies on that list that neither have a unique selling point (Dropbox, Doordash, Pinterest etc..) nor were they economically super great investment casess with a lot of upside. It is of course very likely that SPCX will trade extremely volatile within the first year and that we will also see cash-outs by long term private equity holders once the lock-period expires. So if you have cash set aside - no investment advice - consider just not throwing it in all at once. I personally plan on playing this in 3 tranches. 1/3 today, 1/3 on the first significant draw down and then another 1/3 whenever I feel it is appropriate.

• 
  TeX64 (@TeX64AI) reported 56 minutes ago

  that's a sync-direction race: your web edits haven't reached the local Dropbox copy yet, so Claude overwrites a stale file. nothing's lost though, Overleaf's History menu keeps every version to restore from. fix: let Dropbox finish pulling before Claude edits.

• 
  Suburban Cyber Technologies (@suburbancyber) reported 56 minutes ago

  Shadow IT used to be "someone installed Dropbox." Now it's "someone connected our CRM to an AI agent without telling IT." Same problem. Different speed. Time to update your governance playbook. That's what I am having to do every couple weeks now it seems. #ITLeadership #CyberSecurity #EnterpriseIT

• 
  Jon (@kpjan99) reported 57 minutes ago

  @WestHerr there and put the key in a Dropbox instead of just checking me in. The little things make a difference. Never had these issues with @NorthtownAuto . They catered to whatever we wanted to do with purchases and service was always on point. Only bought from you because they did

• 
  Nick Bennett (@NickB2005) reported 58 minutes ago

  a company hired me in march to "fix marketing." their words. when i asked what had been done so far, the CEO sent me a dropbox link. inside was a 94-slide strategy deck from the fractional CMO they'd had for five months. beautifully designed, with color-coded ICP segments, a channel prioritization matrix, buyer journey maps with little arrows, TAM analysis, and messaging frameworks. 94 slides. i opened their HubSpot. zero new campaigns launched in those five months. the email sequences were the same ones from 2023. the blog hadn't been touched since january. their one webinar was a repurposed sales deck with no promotion plan. i asked the CEO how much they'd paid for the strategy work. $60K. five months at $12K/month for someone who built slides and attended standups. here's what i did in my first 30 days: rewrote the homepage messaging based on five customer interviews i ran myself. launched a 4-email nurture sequence targeting their top 50 accounts. set up a webinar with a customer willing to tell their story. built the UTM structure so we could actually track what was working. killed three tools they were paying for but nobody logged into. by day 45, the sales team had qualified meetings from inbound for the first time in two quarters. not because i had some brilliant strategy the previous person missed. honestly, the deck was solid. someone just needed to execute it. the problem is the market is flooded with people who call themselves fractional CMOs because the title sounds senior. they show up, do discovery, build a deck, present it to the leadership team, and then just consult. they attend meetings and give opinions but nobody is actually running the campaigns or in HubSpot building workflows or writing the emails or briefing the designer or pulling the performance data on friday to figure out what to change on monday. most early stage companies don't need a strategist. they need someone who can think and ship in the same week. someone who will build the system, run it, measure it, and iterate without needing a team underneath them to do the work. that's the gig i run. and every time i walk into a company that had a "fractional CMO" before me, i find the same thing: a great deck collecting dust and a team that still doesn't know what to do on monday morning.