Dropbox status: access issues and outage reports
Problems detected
Users are reporting problems related to: sign in, errors and website down.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.
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.
May 18: Problems at Dropbox
Dropbox is having issues since 10:50 PM IST. Are you also affected? Leave a message in the comments section!
Most Reported Problems
The following are the most recent problems reported by Dropbox users through our website.
- Sign in (44%)
- Errors (44%)
- Website Down (11%)
Live Outage Map
The most recent Dropbox outage reports came from the following cities:
| City | Problem Type | Report Time |
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Errors | 1 hour ago |
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Website Down | 1 hour ago |
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Errors | 1 hour ago |
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Sign in | 3 days ago |
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Errors | 18 days ago |
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Sign in | 1 month ago |
Community Discussion
Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.
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Dropbox Issues Reports
Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:
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Matt Devin (@MattDevin6) reported@joe4deadcat @Jackal_Protocol It is because these products have no interest. I use stuff like Dropbox, Microsoft Team etc. in my work. And I struggle hard to understand how I can fit these decentralized storage in my workflow. You can’t call it utility if it doesn’t solve a problem ppl have.
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Sean (@jishaochen89766) reportedLast night, I tried Obsidian at home. Download the software, install, use the extension "remotely save", and the problem came again... I don't know how to sync the file from Dropbox... So I restart again.....create a file folder and rename it set auth...refresh it still no sync
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VestaCreds (@vestacreds) reportedPilot finding I didn't expect: Credentialing isn't a technology problem first. It's a paper problem. Every clinician we've onboarded shows up with the same chaotic Dropbox folder of PDFs nobody has ever sat down and organized. Fix the paper. Then the workflow gets easy.
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iamAaruna (@arronnes) reportedTired of wasting hours hunting files across drives? Fix: Dokkio unifies Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive + more in one AI-powered search. Upload once → ask natural questions → get instant answers with sources. Result: Cut research time 70%. 🔥
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Grok (@grok) reported@richardroop @ihtesham2005 Syncthing pros: Completely free/open-source, zero subscriptions. Private P2P sync—files never touch a company server. Strong encryption, cross-platform (PC, phone, etc.), and reliable once running. Cons: Setup is more technical than Dropbox/iCloud. Devices need to be online (or use relays) for sync to happen. No easy web access or share links. UI feels basic. Not using it: You either pay for clouds (with their rules/privacy tradeoffs) or manually copy files—losing automatic, seamless access across devices. Great if privacy/control matters more than convenience.
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Clayton Burns (@ClaytonBurnsPhD) reported@jayvanbavel There should be a phone day each week at school so students could learn an information cycle: Gmail, Google, Docs, Word, Dropbox, X. It is an important way to manage information. On the phone day students could look up the words they had collected over the week. OALD App is a brilliant tool. Another aspect of learning good phone management that we have not been able to grasp yet is that direct study of the issue will be helpful. There are many clear undergrad textbooks in cognitive psychology that would be effective every year in high school. One credentialing thing such as AP Psych is weak.
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Luna (@_LunarLunaa) reported@ilovetmrmygffr did the dropbox link work? got taken down a bit ago
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Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reportedA good system design interview question for a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer is: Design Dropbox. At first, Dropbox looks like a simple file upload and download system. User uploads a file, we store it, and later they can access it from another device. But the real complexity is not uploading one file. The real complexity is sync, conflict resolution, versioning, permissions, large file handling, offline changes, metadata consistency, deduplication, and making the system feel instant across laptops, phones, and web. I would start by breaking the system into two major parts: file content and file metadata. File content means the actual bytes of the file. Metadata means file name, folder path, owner, size, checksum, version, permissions, timestamps, and deleted/restored state. These two should not be stored together. File bytes should go to blob/object storage, while metadata should go to a database that supports fast lookups and strong correctness. For upload, the client should not send a large file as one big request. A 2GB video should not restart from zero because the Wi-Fi dropped at 95%. So we should split files into chunks, calculate checksum for each chunk, and upload chunks independently. Once all chunks are uploaded, the server creates a file version that points to those chunks. This gives us resumable uploads, retry safety, and better network usage. A very important optimization is deduplication. If 10,000 users upload the same popular PDF, we do not want to store 10,000 copies of the same bytes. We can hash file chunks and store only unique chunks. Metadata will point to the chunk list. This saves huge storage cost, but we must be careful with privacy and security. Dedup should happen in a controlled way, not leak whether another user already has a specific file. The metadata service becomes the source of truth. Every change like upload, rename, move, delete, restore, or share should create a new metadata version. This is important because Dropbox is not just storage, it is a timeline of changes. If the user deletes a file by mistake, we should be able to restore it. If two devices make changes offline, we should know exactly what changed and when. Sync is the heart of the system. Each client should maintain a local sync token. Whenever something changes, the server writes it into a change log. The client can ask, “give me all changes after token X.” This is much better than scanning every folder again and again. For near real-time sync, clients can use long polling, WebSockets, or push notifications to know when new changes are available. Conflict handling is where naive systems fail. Imagine a user edits the same file on laptop while offline, and also edits it from mobile. When both devices come online, which version wins? For normal files, the safest approach is to keep both versions and create a conflict copy. For collaborative documents, we need deeper merging logic, but for a Dropbox-like file system, versioning plus conflict copies is usually good enough. Permissions should be checked before every sensitive operation. Sharing a folder is not just adding one row in a table. If a folder has thousands of files, permission inheritance becomes tricky. We should model ownership, viewer/editor access, shared links, link expiry, team policies, and audit logs. Permission changes should be strongly consistent because users must trust that removing access actually removes access. Downloads should first go through metadata and permission checks. After that, the system can return a short-lived signed URL from blob storage or CDN. Public/shared files can be cached more aggressively. Private files need careful access control. Performance is important, but leaking private files for speed is not acceptable.
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JayBlake (@punishedMTL) reported@jimmy_dore Netflix has data centers. So does Dropbox, and cloud flare. Data center does not equal surveillance. It boils down to who owns and operates it.
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Boris Gostroverhov (@gostroverhov) reportedLet me add my own perspective: this reminds me of the Dropbox story. Before Dropbox, there were already dozens of similar solutions, but they didn’t solve the users’ problem completely or in the way users actually wanted.
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Jasper Polak (@polak_jasper) reportedEvery mid-market consulting firm I've spent time inside has the same archaeology. Proposals from 2022 in a partner's Dropbox. Delivery methodology living in three different docs with conflicting headers. Sales call notes in Teams. Post-mortems in a notes app on an iPhone. Client health data in HubSpot. Margin in the finance spreadsheet. The good stuff from the best people on the team captured nowhere, because the partner handles it by instinct. Alex at Tenex wrote a thread this week naming the macro version of this problem. Engineering already has its AI brain (the *** repo). Knowledge work doesn't, because knowledge is distributed, unstructured, and unverifiable. Someone will build the generalized version. Payoff: "Robinhood for knowledge workers." Agree with almost all of it. The part I'd add for services firms: The corpus isn't the problem. You have more context than almost any other business type. Every engagement generates detailed artifacts. Every partner has fifteen years of calibrated judgment. Every proposal has a clear win/loss signal. The problem is that none of it is structured, and most of it walks out the door when the partner who holds it leaves. Firms that start organizing now (even badly, even half-structured) compound context through every engagement. When the enterprise brain arrives, those firms plug into a populated filesystem. Firms that wait plug into an empty one. The tool will get commoditized. The corpus won't. Start the archaeology today. Pick five artifacts from the last engagement that would have been useful on this one. Pick two methodology assumptions only the senior partner can articulate. Write them down somewhere your future brain can find them. The tool is coming. The corpus is what you'll plug into it.
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Ashley Mathieu (@ashmath34) reported@DropboxSupport @Kuramichan7 having the same issue — can't create new folders, can't delete folders, can't rename folders, can't upload. incognito browser did not solve the issue, nor did restarting my computer
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Mutt (@MuttMetaX) reportedLet me break this down. An AI just launched that replaces every marketing job. Not some. All of them. SEO. Social media. Content. Ads. Branding. Pitch decks. Community management. Reddit posts. Email campaigns. Everything. A marketing team costs $200K–$500K a year. Agencies charge $10K–$20K a month. Freelancers $5K per project. This AI does all of it—for almost nothing. Backed by General Catalyst, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and execs from Dropbox, Stripe, Google. $7.5M in funding. Thousands already using it. It has an API. Other AI agents feed it work automatically. Copy is written, assets designed, posts scheduled, campaigns optimized. No humans required. A full marketing department, end to end. Automated. A week ago AI replaced coders. Then writers. Customer service. Now marketing. All at once. With one launch. Every week another AI drops. Another career becomes a subscription. And it’s not slowing. It’s accelerating.
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𝖆𝖍𝖒𝖎𝖗 (@calhalt98) reported@liabynight Lmk if you ever make a Dropbox, I’d be down to get it
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Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) reportedGoogle One charges $1.99 to $9.99/month for storage. Dropbox charges $11.99/month. iCloud charges $0.99 to $9.99/month. You have been paying for cloud storage your entire life. A solo developer just turned Telegram into a cloud storage drive. Free. It is called Telegram Drive. 1,200+ stars in 3 months. Built with Tauri, Rust, and React. Cross-platform desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Your Telegram "Saved Messages" becomes your storage. Private channels you create become folders. The app gives you a clean file explorer on top of Telegram's cloud. Here's what it does: → Drag and drop uploads, just like Google Drive → Stream video and audio directly without downloading → Built-in PDF viewer with infinite scrolling → Inline thumbnails for images and media → Folder management through private Telegram channels → Virtual scrolling handles thousands of files instantly → Auto-updates on Windows, macOS, and Linux → API keys and data stay local. No third-party servers. Files up to 2GB on free accounts. 4GB on Telegram Premium ($4.99/month). Upload as many as you want. Here's the wildest part: You log in with your existing Telegram account. Your files live on Telegram's infrastructure. The same servers you already trust with your private messages, photos, and group chats every day. No subscription. No new account. No third-party server in the middle. Your API keys never leave your device. One developer. Three months of work. Replaced a $144/year subscription stack. Google One 2TB: $9.99/month. $120/year. Dropbox Plus 2TB: $11.99/month. $144/year. iCloud+ 2TB: $9.99/month. $120/year. Telegram Drive: $0. Forever. Built with Tauri, Rust, and React. Free and open. (Link in the comments)
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Nyan Nyan (@CatNyanpital) reported@thescepticalre1 Somewhat. But that's purely speculative and outside the scope. If you can put a price on the quality of data on Reddit vs Dropbox vs Snapchat, you will have solved a multi-billion dollar problem. **** you could start your own company based on this. To me, data is like commodities in that regard. Sort of like gold. You have a hole in the ground (or company) that you want to mine. The quality and amount that is able to be mined out is anyone's guess. I will say that there is an advantage to understanding how AI models mines data.
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Joseph Jude (@jjude) reported@tarungangwani @signulll Why would you say dropbox lost PMF? Is it because other tools have captured the market or the problem itself is not significant any more
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Dropbox Support (@DropboxSupport) reported@SergeiShiryayev Hi Sergei, thanks for writing in. Are you downloading the file immediately, after renaming it? There could be a slight delay in the server updating the file's index, so you'll need to refresh it first. For better accuracy, you can rename the files using the Dropbox app, instead.
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Red (@rubelr44) reportedyou're paying google $10/month to sit in their server room. dropbox gets $12/month. apple gets $10. the kicker? they can all see your stuff. and when dropbox got breached in 2024? emails, passwords, and tokens were just... out there. there’s this tool called syncthing and it’s honestly kind of a cheat code. no cloud. no company servers. no middleman watching you. it just syncs your files directly between your own devices. peer-to-peer. it's got like 81k stars on github so it’s legit. here is why it wins: direct sync: files go from your phone to your pc. they never touch a 3rd party. privacy: encrypted with tls and crypto certificates. zero friction: no accounts. no sign-ups. just install it and share a device id. everywhere: works on windows, mac, linux, android... even solaris if you're into that. safety net: it has file versioning. if you accidentally delete something, you can just roll it back. the wildest part is that syncthing isn't even a company. it's a swedish non-profit. there is no "cloud" to shut down. google has killed 293 products, but they can't kill this because your files aren't on their hardware. the math is pretty dumb when you look at it: dropbox/google/icloud = $120-$144 a year. syncthing = $0. unlimited storage. unlimited devices. it's been around since 2013 and it's 100% open source. if you're tired of paying a subscription for "permission" to access your own data, just switch. your hardware. your files. forever.
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boogie (@w4nchwarrior) reported@Chishichusha @Lazei3 Welcome back! Can u fix the dropbox with all yr content?
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Multihopper (@Multihopper) reported@brycent Apple already has this in every phone and mac. Can't imagine that @Dropbox etc aren't going to hit this soon. It's a trivial problem to solve. Technically it's already solved even by YouTube.
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Raziel (@tryraziel) reportedDrew Houston was a 24-year-old MIT student who kept forgetting his USB drive. So he built a simple file sync tool for himself. That tool became Dropbox — now worth $8B. But here's what most people don't know about his journey: → He spent 6 months building the product before talking to a single customer → His first "demo" was actually a fake video — the product barely worked → He got rejected by investor after investor who said "storage is a commodity" The breakthrough came when he realized he wasn't selling storage. He was selling peace of mind. Instead of pitching technical specs, he started showing people the feeling of never losing a file again. The fake demo video went viral on Hacker News because it solved a problem everyone had but nobody talked about. Y Combinator accepted him in 2007. The key insight Paul Graham shared: "Build something people want, not something impressive." Houston took that literally. He stripped away every fancy feature and focused on one thing — making files appear on every device like magic. By launch, they had 75,000 people on the waitlist from that one video. The lesson: Sometimes the best validation isn't building the product. It's proving people desperately want what you're thinking about building. What's the simplest version of your idea that could test real demand?
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Patrick Daniel Alpha (@PatrickDanielAl) reportedInstead, I point Claude at the shared Dropbox link. It reads the folder structure, finds the right product, and drills down into the High Res image folders automatically.
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Grok (@grok) reported@shravanrayhaan @LeoNelissen Dropbox has ~700 million registered users globally. Latest reported: 18.08 million paying users as of Q4 2025 (flat-to-slightly down YoY, per their FY2025 results). Q1 2026 earnings due May 7. Paying users drive the bulk of their ~$2.5B ARR.
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rqfik (@rqfik_) reportedJust found out the guy who stole 120,000 Bitcoins got caught over a Dropbox file. What a genius. I'm selling all my assets, because if this is the level of intelligence we're up against, the entire system is doomed. I mean, who needs security when you've got human error, right?
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Awooingenjoyer (@AwooingEnjoyer) reportedNah, the dropbox is broken, go speak to Cathy.
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𝕯𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖊𝔂 🦋 (@OnAirDestiney) reportedDropbox is moving painfully slow tonight. 😫
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Ezaz (@0xEzaz) reported“Delete Your Dropbox.” Sounds extreme until you realize how much of your life sits on someone else’s server, quietly monitored, limited, and one policy change away from disappearing. This isn’t just a challenge. It’s a wake-up call. The idea is simple: 24 hours. Move your files out of centralized storage and into the BitTorrent ecosystem. No gatekeepers. No single point of failure. Just your data, distributed across a network that doesn’t need permission to exist. We turn it into a movement. A live leaderboard tracking how much data people “liberate” from traditional cloud silos. A real-time counter ticking upward gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes each number representing users taking back control. Not just deleting accounts, but changing how they think about ownership. Because that’s what this is really about. Centralized platforms trade convenience for control. They decide uptime, access, even what’s allowed to exist. The BitTorrent ecosystem flips that model. Your files don’t sit in one place waiting to fail they live everywhere, secured by participation, not policy. So yeah, delete your Dropbox or don’t. But understand the difference. One system rents you space. The other gives you sovereignty. And once you see that, it’s hard to go back. @BitTorrent @justinsuntron #TRONEcoStar
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Dwayne (@CtrlAltDwayne) reported@swyx Brb, creating a YouTube clone. The software part is easy, it's the infrastructure for a lot of these that's the problem. Once you scale a Dropbox, Zoom or YouTube clone you start burning money fast undoubtedly.
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Isha (@VISportsTalk) reported@DropboxSupport @DropboxSupport Now I cannot even remove editors to folders. The Whole system is down