Dropbox Archive

Ultra-popular file sharing service Dropbox is currently down. The outage was first reported by Dave Winer and it appears the service has been down for approximately an hour. Twitter users are noting that the service is currently not functioning. The Dropbox status page notes, “hi all. we’re aware of the downtime and are working on getting things back up and running. sorry for the inconvenience!”

I was able to get to the Dropbox home page on several refreshes but am presented with the following error message, ”
Error (5xx) – Something went wrong. Don’t worry, your files are still safe and the Dropboxers have been notified. Check out our Help Center or forums for help. Or maybe you should try heading home.”

Popular blogger Anil Dash noted, “Pretty sure Dropbox is just having a little downtime for the PR value of so many folks revealing that they depend on it.”

Interestingly, based on the volume on Twitter, it seems Dropbox is a more popular service than Foursquare. It’s also interesting to look at the type of responses when a service is down. For example, when Tumblr was down last week, Twitter users had the highest volume of curse words and swearing in their tweets. With Dropbox, users are very business-casual in their messages.

For now I suggest printing out all important documents and putting them into one of those manilla expanding file folders. Or you could go outside!

Update 1:15pm Eastern – the Dropbox web site and client is back up and running.

Please report in if Dropbox is down for you – also note how you use Dropbox.