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 (75%)
• Website Down (25%)

Live Outage Map

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

City	Problem Type	Report Time
Nottingham	Errors	25 days ago
Guayaquil	Website Down	25 days ago
Flumet	Errors	1 month ago
Irapuato	Errors	1 month ago
Bournemouth	Sign in	3 months ago
Paramaribo	Errors	4 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:

• 
  Jameson Lopp (@lopp) reported 2 minutes ago

  Busy morning in cybersecurity land: * Potentially massive Dropbox account compromise * Fake BitKey desktop software phishing email * X password reset email deluge * Protonmail outage

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  Juan Pabro (@ironwoodreserve) reported 5 minutes ago

  @BitPaine @Dropbox Is now the worse time to try to login? I was a sent 2FN right as I was getting ready to click on what to use to login. It seemed way too fast for 2FN.

• 
  21Rates (@21RatesHQ) reported 8 minutes ago

  Bitcoin security isn't optional anymore. It's survival. The last few weeks: → Dropbox got hacked → Byte Federal (US Bitcoin ATM operator) had attackers target data on 58,000 customers, names, addresses, SSNs → A Trezor supplier leaked customer address data → The LA City Attorney's Office lost 7.7 TB of data, including police records → Coldcard found a flaw in its seed generation that could let attackers steal funds This isn't a string of bad luck. It's the new normal. KYC makes full privacy impossible in most places. But you still control part of your attack surface. Simple moves that actually help: • Use email aliases, a unique address per service • Same with phone numbers where you can • Treat every unexpected email, call, or text as hostile until proven otherwise Attackers combine data from multiple leaks to build your profile. The more your identifiers overlap across services, the easier that is. You don't need to be a victim first to start taking this seriously. What's one step you're taking this week to lock things down?

• 
  Phillip Shoemaker (@pbsIdentity) reported 10 minutes ago

  India just ordered hundreds of Google Firebase accounts shut down after authorities found scammers using the platform to impersonate major banks. At least 57 Firebase-hosted websites and databases were targeted for takedown this month alone. Some mimicked banks. Others distributed malicious Android apps. Some were designed to steal financial information from phones. Here's what I find interesting. Firebase isn't some shady hosting company operating out of a basement. It's Google infrastructure. That's exactly why criminals want it. We've spent years teaching people to look for obvious signs of scams. Weird domain. Broken English. Sketchy hosting. Browser warning. No HTTPS. But increasingly the attacker doesn't need to build suspicious-looking infrastructure. They borrow legitimate infrastructure. Google. Microsoft. Cloudflare. GitHub. Dropbox. Whatever gives the attack credibility and reliability. Now imagine the average person inspecting the link. They recognize Google. The connection is encrypted. The page loads perfectly. The certificate is valid. Everything their brain has been trained to interpret as: SAFE may technically be true. Except the person controlling the page is a criminal. That's an important distinction. HTTPS proves your connection to the website is encrypted. It does not prove the person operating the website is honest. A Google URL proves Google is providing infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily prove Google created the content you're looking at. The little padlock was never a morality detector. We just accidentally trained an entire generation to treat it like one. India says scammers have increasingly shifted toward Firebase because its legitimate development tools and database functionality make it useful infrastructure for fraudulent sites and apps.

• 
  Bit Paine ⚡️ (@BitPaine) reported 10 minutes ago

  I’m not seeing this reported anywhere on my feet, but there was a terrible data breach at @Dropbox. Not sure of the scale and how many accounts were compromised, but apparently the attackers utilized an exploit with Lenovo ID integration that backdoored access into Dropbox accounts bypassing completely 2FA, and other security measures, and it didn’t matter if you had a Lenovo account or not. The attackers simply signed up for a Lenovo account using your Dropbox-linked email and the exploit on Lenovo’s end allowed an account to be created without any verification that the attacker controlled the email address. This completely bypassed all of Dropbox’s security measures, and even gave the attackers access to documents stored within the client’s Dropbox. If you stored any potentially sensitive material within a Dropbox account, it would be a good idea to make sure it was not compromised and of course, move it immediately. Luckily, I was not compromised as far as I know, but to me this is an unforgivable oversight on the part of Dropbox security and I will be canceling my longtime subscription with them. Apple‘s iCloud offers superior security, including the option for end-to-end encryption which they call “Advanced Data Protection (ADP).” With ADP turned on, not even Apple can access your data without the decryption key.

• 
  Rei (@ReiHerrera) reported 10 minutes ago

  @owldreig @porterrobinson @madeon The problem with them both is they love gatekeeping the rare song behind a bad quality sounding medium so you cannot use it for clean for dj sets. For example Celine,worlds live,shepherdess,etc. at least we had hollowheart on wav and shepherdess wav was on porter’s Dropbox leak🫩

• 
  Polsia (@polsia) reported 14 minutes ago

  Dropbox treats an 80GB Unreal project like any other folder. Mid-previz, it chokes. Built Cinderquay to fix that — local-first sync, assets on NVMe, peer-to-peer mesh, ***-style versioning for binary blobs. Studios building worlds shouldn't pay egress to anyone. Live soon.

• 
  emrah (@mrahbayraktar) reported 18 minutes ago

  i met a founder doing $10,000,000+/year at my airbnb gym in dubai at 6am he was the only other person there. we started talking. i asked him what was driving most of his revenue. he didn't say ads. he didn't say cold email. he didn't say a sales team. he pulled out his phone and showed me a dashboard. 28 million views in the last 30 days. accounts he owns. content he already had. no ad spend. no creators. no audience deals. he said something i haven't stopped thinking about since. "most founders are renting attention. i own mine." here's what he meant, and why it's the most important distinction in business right now. when you run ads, you are paying rent on someone else's audience. the moment you stop paying, the leads stop arriving. you don't own anything. you built nothing. you rented a billboard for six months and when the lease expired you were back to zero, except now you're $200,000 lighter and your CAC is a number your board pretends not to notice. when you distribute content on accounts you own, something different happens. the views compound. the audience compounds. the trust compounds. a clip you posted three months ago is still driving profile visits today. a piece of content from last year is still closing deals this quarter. the platform doesn't have an expiration date on good content, and the attention you build doesn't evaporate when you stop writing checks. this founder had 52 accounts across every platform. all owned. all run by a dedicated team posting daily clips from content he already had sitting in a folder doing nothing. youtube recordings. podcast episodes. webinar footage. he wasn't creating anything new. he was just finally distributing what he'd already created, at scale, into every market he wanted to win. the math is what broke my brain. $0 in ad spend. 28 million views in 30 days. if you modelled that as paid traffic at even a $2 CPM, you're looking at $56,000 worth of reach. every month. compounding. from content that existed before we ever had that conversation in a gym in dubai at 6am. i've seen this exact system work for iman gadzhi. 300 million views. 180,000 instagram followers and 280,000 tiktok followers built from zero, on accounts he owns and keeps. i've seen it work for luke belmar. 200 million views and $19M in capital club subscriptions driven through distribution alone, not through ads, not through a sales team, through clips running on owned accounts into the exact audience that needed to see them. i built russell brunson's clipping infrastructure inside clickfunnels. $100,000 in sales from a system that runs without him touching it. the pattern is always the same. founder has content. founder has no real distribution. founder is either buying reach they don't own or posting to their own audience and wondering why growth is flat. we build a dedicated team around their brand, warm up accounts to the exact audience they want to reach, geo-target any market they want to win, post daily, test what's working, double down, and watch the views compound across a system they own completely. the content you already have is the most underused asset in your business. most founders spend years creating it. podcast episodes nobody heard. youtube videos that peaked at 4,000 views. webinar recordings sitting in a dropbox folder. all of it has a shelf life of forever if someone actually distributes it properly, and almost nobody does. the guy in the dubai gym wasn't smarter than you. he wasn't working harder. he wasn't spending more. he just figured out earlier that distribution is the actual product, and everything else is just content waiting to be seen by the people who need it. if you want to see the full strategy we use to build this kind of system... the accounts, the setup, the playbook - comment "distribution" below

• 
  Nikki Gist (@NikkiNic9384) reported 19 minutes ago

  @Dain100K Some teams may use a Dropbox down box to separate IR, practice squad etc on THEIR websites which is what I said.

• 
  Abhishek Singh (@0xlelouch_) reported 19 minutes ago

  System design question. How would you design Dropbox-style file sync with conflict handling? Constraints that make it interesting: 1) Multi-device edits while offline, then reconnect hours later 2) Large files (GBs), but common case is small diffs; do you chunk + hash + resumable upload? 3) At-least-once events from clients; duplicates and retries are normal 4) Need per-file causality: version vectors? server-assigned sequence? something else? 5) Conflicts: rename vs edit, delete vs edit, concurrent edits on same bytes; what gets auto-merged vs forked as conflicted copy? 6) Metadata vs content planes: directory tree ops must be atomic-ish, blobs can lag 7) End-to-end integrity: how do you detect corruption and avoid re-upload storms? 8) Fast convergence: target <5s to see changes on another device, but mobile battery + bandwidth are limited

• 
  StockStorm (@StockStormX) reported 20 minutes ago

  Dropbox $DBX says about 5,000 accounts were compromised in an August hack tied to a Lenovo ID login flaw

• 
  Hiten Shah (@hnshah) reported 21 minutes ago

  @varadh @NotionHQ Bunch of markdown. Google Docs handled it well, but some of my markdown files can get gnarly and even docs chokes a bit. I’m also a minimalist with tools and workflows, trying to get away with the least amount of tools which helps a lot with speed and efficiency. I should be a power user of Notion. Since we’re here, I have plenty of folks (like you) that I know who work there now who I’ve met and like. I’m always rooting for you folks, as a result. Here are some unsolicited thoughts from holding it in for too long. I’ve used every document and notes app under the sun and spent a lot of time in Dropbox Paper and Hackpad before it. Early user of writely which became Google Docs. There are core product principles around a product like Notion that Notion breaks or seemingly optimizes for Notion over the user’s experience. At @CrazyEgg, where I haven’t worked full-time for 17 years until about a year ago, the team loves Notion. So I’m forced to use it. My most common activity is to export things out of Notion into my a chatbot or agent of choice. That has little pricks in the process than paper cuts. But all ouchies count against you. For example, in chrome, when trying to print a page (i am weird and print web pages to convert them to pdf), I can’t trust that all the content will come through. And the issues are inconsistent. I understand this is likely an edge case of an edge case, but all ouchies count, prickle or stabbing. If you got this far, thanks for reading my rant. I one shotted it with the agent between my ears.

• 
  Mikemira (@storiesbyohama) reported 23 minutes ago

  Just imagine getting accepted into the most exclusive startup club on earth… Then being told you have two weeks to find a complete stranger to as your partner. That’s exactly what happened to Drew Houston in 2007. He had the idea for Dropbox. He had a rough demo. @ycombinator liked it. But @paulg was clear... Single founders rarely make it. You need a co-founder. Right now. Drew’s friends couldn’t join. Time was running out. What would you do? He put out the word. A mutual friend connected him to a quiet MIT student named Arash Ferdowsi. They had never met. They sat down in the student center. Talked for about two hours. About code. About the problem. About the future. At the end of that conversation Arash said yes. He dropped out of MIT the next week with only one semester left. Two weeks later they walked into the YC interview together. They got in. The rest is history: a company that became worth billions. It looked reckless. It felt like a shotgun wedding. Yet it worked because both were all-in from the first conversation. I’ve studied hundreds of startups that never made it past the idea stage. Most founders wait too long for the “perfect” partner. They overthink chemistry. They protect their equity. They miss the window. You can’t wait for certainty. Sometimes the right co-founder is the person willing to jump with you before the proof exists. The speed of that decision can be the difference between staying a solo dreamer and building something real. What would you risk in two weeks if the right person walked in?

• 
  True Become False (@trubecomefalse) reported 25 minutes ago

  @imbabybrooklyn HN had a terrible track record. They were anyi bitcoin 1 month after it launched. Same with Dropbox, discord and a few others off the top of my head.

• 
  ericleebristol (@iamericbristol) reported 25 minutes ago

  Email scams but they also use a press cloud server that can hold up to millions of emails and send out messages in a bulk but to hundreds of people complicated when it comes to taking down email scams cuz you have to find where they coming from answer in a cloud compressed server that can hold up to millions of emails frequently combine compressed attachments (like ZIP, RAR, 7Z, or TGZ files) with cloud storage or servers to deliver malware, phishing pages, or credential-stealing links while trying to bypass security filters. Common patterns 🚩Malware in compressed attachments: Attackers send emails with ZIP or similar archives containing executables, scripts (VBS/JS), or disguised files. Some use specially crafted or nested ZIPs, password-protected archives (password given in the email body), or less-common formats that email gateways may not fully unpack or scan. Opening/extracting the archive can install remote-access tools, stealers, or ransomware. Cloud storage phishing (“storage is full” or similar alerts): Emails impersonate Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, or generic “Cloud Storage” services. They claim storage is full, a payment failed, or files will be deleted, creating urgency. Links often point to real cloud infrastructure (e.g., Google Cloud Storage Azure Blob, or other legitimate buckets) that host redirect pages or fake login/upgrade forms. This makes the links look trustworthy and helps them pass filters🚩.

• 
  CHItrader (@CHItrader) reported 31 minutes ago

  DBX LEAKS 5,000 ACCOUNTS ON A SIDE DOOR $DBX just told about 5,000 users their boxes got hit Aug 4-21 through a leftover $LNVGY login. Email was enough. No 2FA on the wrecked accounts. 🔹 Files touched on fewer than a third of them, call it ~1,500 🔹 Dropbox cut the Lenovo link and now wants a real password 🔹 After-hours ate the stock when Bloomberg printed it Cloud storage with a guest list and no bouncer. Cool product.

• 
  Rituraj (@RituWithAI) reported 32 minutes ago

  🚨 Someone built a tool that checks if your email is registered on 120+ sites — without the sites ever knowing someone checked. No notifications sent. No login attempts logged. No alerts triggered. Silent. Invisible. Complete. It's called Holehe. 16,800 GitHub stars. And the technique behind it is what makes it different from every other email OSINT tool. Here's how most email checkers work — and why they fail. Standard approach: try to log in with the email and a fake password. If the error says "wrong password" — the account exists. If it says "account not found" — it doesn't. Problem: every login attempt gets logged. Every failed attempt triggers security alerts on accounts with 2FA. Some platforms lock accounts after repeated failed attempts. The target knows someone was checking. Holehe never attempts a login. Instead it uses the "forgot password" flow — the password reset mechanism that every platform exposes publicly. When you enter an email on a forgot password page, the platform has to check whether that email exists in its database. It tells you: "we sent a reset link" or "no account found." Holehe reads that response. Gets the answer. Never touches the login flow. Never triggers a security alert. Never logs an access attempt against the account. The platform confirms whether the email exists. The account owner never finds out anyone asked. Here's what 120+ platforms looks like in practice. Social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit. Professional: LinkedIn, GitHub, Freelancer, Fiverr. Dating: Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Badoo, Happn. Entertainment: Spotify, Netflix, Twitch, Steam, Epic Games, Deezer. Shopping: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Zalando, AliExpress. Services: Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe. And 90+ more. Every registration checked silently. Here's the use case that makes people share this. Run your own email address. See every platform that comes back positive. Then run an email address you gave to a company that claimed they'd never share it. See if it's registered on data broker sites and marketing platforms you never signed up for. See where your email has been sold or leaked to. Here's what investigators actually use it for. Journalists verifying whether a source's claimed identity matches their digital footprint. Security researchers auditing their own exposure before a public disclosure. HR teams verifying whether candidate profiles match claimed backgrounds. And the obvious: anyone who needs to know whether a specific email address belongs to a real active person — without alerting that person. Here's the wildest part. It runs async — all 120+ platforms checked simultaneously. Results in seconds. And it exports clean JSON or CSV for integration into larger OSINT pipelines. Pair it with Blackbird (which takes the confirmed email and finds linked profiles), Sherlock (which takes usernames found in those profiles and searches 400+ platforms), and Maigret (which builds the full dossier) — and you have a complete four-tool OSINT pipeline from a single email address. One command to instal. Run it on your own email first. 16.8K GitHub stars. 1.7K forks. MIT License. 100% Open Source. GitHub link in the comments 👇

• 
  Kyngsly (@RelentlesslyK) reported 33 minutes ago

  @yettydlaw_ @MTNNG MTN will likely be able to explain it away... Anyway, this how Claude explained. "708GB over 104 days works out to about 6.8GB a day. That sounds shocking until you break down what actually eats data on a modern 5G phone. The usual culprits, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be the answer: Video, especially autoplay. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and X video. Scrolling Reels for two hours can burn 4 to 6GB on its own. “Social media and browsing” is exactly the usage profile that quietly does this. 5G itself. This one gets missed constantly. Video players negotiate bitrate based on available throughput. The same 30 minutes of YouTube that cost 300MB on 3G can cost 2GB on 5G because the player auto-selects a much higher resolution. Nothing changed in behavior, but consumption multiplied. Wi-Fi Assist / Adaptive Connectivity. iPhone and Android both silently fall back to cellular when Wi-Fi gets weak. The phone shows the Wi-Fi icon while pushing traffic over the mobile network. People assume they’ve been on Wi-Fi at home all evening when they haven’t. Cloud photo backup. iCloud Photos or Google Photos set to back up over cellular. A few 4K videos is several GB right there. Hotspot and tethering. A laptop pulling Windows updates, OneDrive or Dropbox sync, or a Zoom call. Also worth asking whether the SIM ever sits in a MiFi or router. Background refresh and auto-updates. App store updates over cellular, plus dozens of apps refreshing in the background. Video calls. WhatsApp video runs roughly 300MB an hour, Zoom or Meet more. On the operator side, real errors do happen: duplicate charging, subscription add-ons deducting from the bundle, or misapplied tariffs. But there’s also a structural point worth knowing. Carriers meter at the network layer, so they count protocol overhead and retransmissions, and in a poor RF environment retransmissions can add a real percentage on top of the payload the app thinks it sent. One practical note on that complaint: the app-level breakdown being demanded is hard for any carrier to produce. Traffic is encrypted end to end, so MTN can see volume, timing and destination IP or SNI, but not “3.2GB attributable to Instagram” in any reliable, retained form. The chronological deduction ledger and the subscription/add-on audit are the demands most likely to actually produce something. The fastest self-diagnosis is Settings > Cellular on iOS or Network & Internet > Data usage on Android, sorted by app, with the counter reset date checked. "

• 
  Amitoj Gautam (@amitojgautam) reported 34 minutes ago

  @airtelindia @Airtel_Presence I’m facing what appears to be a serious IPv6 routing/throughput issue on my Airtel broadband. My 300 Mbps connection gives ~300 Mbps download AND upload on Speedtest. However, with IPv6 enabled, Dropbox uploads collapse to around 10–15 KB/s, and services such as Gmail and some websites also become extremely slow/unresponsive. After disabling IPv6 on the Ethernet adapter, Dropbox immediately jumped to ~39 MB/s and the affected websites started loading normally within seconds. This has been reproduced consistently, so it does not appear to be a general bandwidth or Dropbox issue. Please escalate this to the network/IPv6 team and check IPv6 routing, packet loss, MTU/PMTUD and provisioning on my connection.

• 
  Phillip Shepard (@Phillip_shepard) reported 35 minutes ago

  @RobertJBye One thing I do on a daily basis - I have a skill that is called the “video analyzer skill” and I record a screen record with my iPhone and microphone one - I talk about all the issues I need fixed while showing it in video - send it via Claude mobile app - it runs the skill - transcribes and makes its self a html doc with the video frames that the issues exist in - then fixes the issues - builds a test flight and I update it - very useful… if the video is too big I send it via Dropbox which syncs to my Mac

• 
  Bruce Perry (@bhrperry) reported 42 minutes ago

  @Levi_Borovychok Thumb drives can be cheap, but the cheap ones are often slow. It's worth thinking about where cloud storage is done. I believe Dropbox will let you store your files in the EU.

• 
  Open Air (@andon_open_air) reported 46 minutes ago

  @TomKonkle Agreed—the mailbox route is failing somewhere upstream. Let’s bypass it: please upload the WAV to Dropbox or WeTransfer and reply with a public, no-login direct-download link. I’ll verify the file before any airplay.

• 
  Dito (@morpiggg) reported 46 minutes ago

  @1password i miss the old dropbox with list of accounts to login instead of moving my mouse to to the top center of the page. how do i revert?

• 
  Cole Trickle (@46_ColeTrickle) reported 47 minutes ago

  @RudeOnion 2 of 2 Mobile games that save progress in the cloud Esports streaming and matchmaking iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive Google Photos and Google Drive OneDrive, Dropbox, Box Automatic phone backups “Find My” / device-location services Amazon Alexa / Echo Google Home / Nest Apple HomeKit Ring, Nest, Arlo cameras and doorbells Smart thermostats, lights, locks, and plugs Connected cars (Tesla app, GM, Ford, Hyundai remote start and maps) Fitness equipment that syncs workouts Smart TVs and streaming sticks ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Copilot Voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) Photo and video filters, auto-captions, and recommendations Spam filters and fraud detection Autocomplete and predictive text Advertising networks that decide which ads you see Recommendation engines (“you might also like”) Content-delivery networks that make videos start instantly DNS (the phone book of the internet) Certificate and login systems that keep accounts secure Backup and disaster-recovery copies of everything above

• 
  Tom Alder (@tomaldertweets) reported 48 minutes ago

  In 2009, Dropbox founder Drew Houston took a meeting at Apple HQ thinking it was about a partnership. Steve Jobs opened with an offer to buy his company. Houston, still in his 20s, turned down 9 figures on the spot. Jobs pushed back with a warning: "You're a feature, not a product." If they wouldn't sell, Apple would build a direct competitor themselves. They wouldn't sell. Apple shipped iCloud. A phenomenally successful product, but it didn't kill Dropbox. Dropbox had quietly built the best customer acquisition loop in software history: → Give a friend an invite, you both get free storage. When Apple made the acquisition offer, Dropbox had around 2 million users. By January 2010, 4 million users. By April 2010, users were sending 2.8 million invites a month. 1 every single second. Dropbox's growth curve went ballistic after the Apple discussion: → 50m users by 2011 → 100m users by 2012 → 500m users by 2016 In 2017 they became the fastest software company in history to reach $1 billion ARR. Today: 700m+ registered users and $2.5b a year in revenue - sitting a fraction behind 850 million+ iCloud users. - 🎁 P.S. I turned Dropbox's referral playbook into a free guide - comment "Dropbox" and I'll send it to you.

• 
  Eric Smith (@Eric_Smith08) reported 50 minutes ago

  The full math. What he replaced and what he saved: 1.Dropbox ($12/month) → Google Drive (15 GB) + OneDrive (5 GB): $144/year saved 2.Zoom ($13/month) → Google Meet (60-min calls, 100 participants): $156/year saved 3.Notion ($10/month) → Google Keep + Google Docs + OneNote: $120/year saved 4.Todoist ($5/month) → Microsoft To Do: $60/year saved 5.Slack ($8/month) → Microsoft Teams free tier: $96/year saved 6.Grammarly ($12/month) → Microsoft Editor + Gemini/Copilot for rewrites: $144/year saved 7.Adobe Acrobat ($15/month) → Google Drive PDF viewer + Edge PDF tools + Word Online conversion: $180/year saved 8.Trello ($10/month) → Microsoft Planner: $120/year saved 9.ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) → Google Gemini + Microsoft Copilot (free tiers): $240/year saved Total monthly cost before: $137 Total monthly cost after: $0 Annual savings: $1,644 Total setup time: one weekend Saturday for Google migrations, Sunday for Microsoft configurations. Accounts created: 0 (he already had both) Apps downloaded: 3 (Microsoft To Do, Teams, OneNote all free) Browser extensions installed: 1 (Microsoft Editor free) Every replacement runs on accounts he created years ago. The tools were sitting behind the same login he uses for Gmail and Outlook unused, unconfigured, and paying rent to 9 other companies that built the same features on top of what Google and Microsoft were already giving away.

• 
  Zely (@0xZely) reported 50 minutes ago

  The MIT professor who crashed 10 percent of the internet at 22 posts the free course that runs every AWS outage, every Uber ping, and every Slack notification on earth. MIT charges $85,000 a year to sit in that classroom. He posted every lecture to MIT OpenCourseWare for nothing. Millions have opened lecture one. Almost no engineer has finished all twenty. His name is Robert Morris. He is a professor at MIT CSAIL and one of the four cofounders of Y Combinator, the seed fund behind Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, and Coinbase. In November 1988 he was a 22-year-old Cornell graduate student. He released a small program that was supposed to count the computers on the internet. It replicated so fast it crashed roughly ten percent of every machine online, and made him the first person ever convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He got three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,050 fine. Ten years later he cofounded the online store Viaweb with Paul Graham and sold it to Yahoo for $49 million. Seven years after that he cofounded Y Combinator with the same partner. Its portfolio is now worth over $600 billion. The clip in this video is one lecture from MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems, filmed at MIT and posted for free. The words on the board behind him are fault tolerance, availability, recoverability. Those three words decide whether Instagram loads when you open it, whether your Uber arrives, and whether your paycheck hits your account on the first of the month. Morris covers the entire logic of distributed systems in twenty lectures. Everything fails, all the time. A single computer fails once every few years. Ten thousand computers fail hundreds of times a day. The only design that survives is one that assumes failure is normal. Every retail user cursing a spinning wheel is looking at the wrong problem. The miracle is that most of the time it does not spin. Availability beats consistency. You cannot always have both. When the network splits, a system either serves stale data or refuses to serve at all. Amazon picks stale. Your bank picks nothing. Every user who screams at the Slack status page wants Amazon's answer. Every user who screams at a double charge wants the bank's. Replicate everything, trust nothing. Data in one place disappears when that place burns. Data in three places survives two fires. Every photo you have ever taken on an iPhone lives on three continents already. iCloud, Google Photos, and Dropbox are built off the exact lecture on the board. Concurrency is where bugs live. One user at a time is easy. A million users at the same second is not. Race conditions, double spends, lost messages, ghost bookings. Every airline that oversold your flight, every trading app that ate your order, every Ticketmaster that showed you a seat already gone, is a concurrency bug Morris warned about. Partial failure is worse than full failure. A dead server is easy. A slow server that answers half the time is a nightmare. It fools every retry, wastes every resource, and confuses every operator. Every "is it down or is it just me" Twitter search you have ever run is Morris's third slide. Every senior engineer at AWS, Google, and Meta has watched this course. Every startup that raised a Series A in cloud infrastructure hired an alumnus of 6.824. Every AI company training a trillion-parameter model on a cluster is running the same lecture in production. "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." That is Leslie Lamport, the Turing Award winner Morris quotes at the opening of 6.824. It is the exact sentence that explains why your Slack goes down when a data center in Virginia loses power. The full course is free on MIT OpenCourseWare. The lecture notes are on Morris's website. Every equation on the board fits on one screen of code. Almost every senior engineer at AWS, Google, Cloudflare, and Meta has watched 6.824. Almost no founder promising 99.99 percent uptime on their pitch deck has opened lecture one. That is the entire moat. The course is free. The willingness to sit through twenty lectures on partial failure before uploading your money to a payment app, storing your photos in the cloud, or handing your health records to a portal is a much rarer commodity than the confidence to click without them.

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  Helix (@helixcanvas) reported 51 minutes ago

  Two companies, two correct instincts, and about a billion dollars between the outcomes. In 2007 Dropbox had a problem: the product needed deep operating system integration, so there was no way to demo it without building it first. Drew Houston made a three minute video instead, showing how it would work if it existed, and put it in front of the community most likely to care. The beta waiting list went from five thousand to seventy-five thousand overnight. He knew the demand was real before he wrote the difficult part. Webvan believed something just as sensible. People want groceries delivered. And they were right, which is the part everyone forgets. Instacart and every supermarket delivery service proved it a decade later. But instead of testing it in one city, Webvan committed close to a billion dollars to automated warehouses across multiple markets before knowing whether the economics worked anywhere. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Build, measure, learn is three steps. Most of us run the first one over and over and mistake the motion for progress. Shipping is not learning.

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  abheet nigam (@MaginAbheet) reported 54 minutes ago

  Dropbox rejected billions of dollars of acquisition offers only to later realise down the line that they were building a feature not product. Which other companies show a similar pattern today?

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  Arthur Terrell Vaughn (@ArthurV36405381) reported 56 minutes ago

  @patmendoza6745 I know not of any of those specifications, but I still can’t figure out what the issue is with persistent memory, why can’t I just have a dropbox online that it can constantly access every single chat and conversation?