Hacker News

Proton AG Services is currently experiencing some issues

28 points by exploraz ago | 28 comments

butz |next [-]

Someone probably pushed to prod on Friday.

fp64 |next |previous [-]

And interesting feeling not being able to check your email on a paid service. I haven't had that in decades.

root-parent |root |parent [-]

Have you used Azure?

cptskippy |root |parent [-]

Have you found any?

cryo32 |root |parent |previous [-]

This is a hilariously apt response.

aarondong |next |previous [-]

literally signed up for proton mail, their yearly paid plan, around half an hour ago.

I assumed an email service was supposed to be stable first, given how important it is. I was going to use proton mail as my contact email with my domain registrar.

This outage may change my mind.

REFUND?

InsideOutSanta |root |parent |next [-]

All services have outages. The difference is that when Outlook goes out (https://uptime.qodex.ai/outlook/incidents), it's a happy occasion because nobody can work and we all take an hour off, but when something like Proton goes offline, we're the only ones who can't access our important stuff.

Anyway, point is, Proton is generally very reliable, but shit happens.

aarondong |root |parent |next [-]

Yeah, just the timing couldn't feel worse in my case. Right after doing some security shuffling and signing up. recency bias

embedding-shape |root |parent |previous [-]

> All services have outages.

I've found this to be true too, that's why I've moved most of my personal email to my own email servers, so at least I can decide when those outages happen, as they tend to mostly happen when you do some changes, not just randomly by themselves. At once you've setup monitoring and recovery for the usual suspects (disks, network, etc).

|root |parent [-]

robertlagrant |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I've used Proton for a couple of years and have never had problems before today, so I think their engineering is of a high standard.

In fact, I applied for an Engineering Director role there not too long ago and they rejected me, so they must have extremely high standards!

bushwart |root |parent [-]

I've been a Proton customer since before they started issuing proton.me email addresses. Never had any problems, including today. Right now I can check my email just fine.

SapporoChris |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I recommend reading documentation on refunds before signing up for service. It's much much more effective than relying on a message board.

imzadi |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I've had proton for years and have no complaints. I can only think of one or two other outages in that time. Most services do have outages from time to time. tbf, I don't seem to be having any issues with proton today, so far.

aarondong |root |parent [-]

Ok good to know it isn't a complete auth outage. I might keep proton, not sure about other options.

heyheyhouhou |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I've been using Proton for few years already and I did not have a single issue

Insanity |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I've been a paying customer for many years and can't recall the last time this happened apart from now. It's honestly been a pretty stable service and rarely encountered any issues with it.

Saris |root |parent |next |previous [-]

What made you pick proton over something like mailbox.org? You'd get calendar and contacts sync, IMAP and POP access, custom domains, really nice webmail, and so on..

Proton seems really limited for what you get, and the webmail is absolutely abysmal in performance and design.

RandomGerm4n |root |parent |next [-]

Mailbox.org is based in Germany, which is why you generally cannot trust its feature that automatically encrypts all incoming emails. Other german mail providers, such as Tuta, have already been forced at the direction of government authorities to store every incoming email from certain accounts separately in unencrypted form. Even though Proton also cooperates with authorities, Swiss data protection laws are significantly stricter in this regard. So far, there is no regulation there that requires them to implement a backdoor. They only disclose metadata, the IP address, and the backup email address. Whereas Mailbox would have to forward the entire emails to the authorities.

Saris |root |parent [-]

I see, I don't use email for anything private because even if my mail server stores it encrypted, it passes through potentially multiple other servers on the way which have unknown privacy.

It's just for notifications and newsletters mostly.

danshipt |root |parent [-]

Doesn’t your bank require an email address? What about your job/employer? Never bought insurance online?

I hate to use emails for private matters too, but can’t avoid it unfortunately

spacephysics |root |parent |previous [-]

I imagine part of the performance issue is their encryption flow? Their search is sub par even with the on-device search enabled, but besides that i’ve been a happy customer for a few years now. Catch all domain, multiple domains, their cli lets you download all messages and I setup a RAG flow to better search.

Regarding outages, this is the first one I’ve actually noticed and affected me. Obviously not great, but maybe I’ve been deluded in seeing GitHub‘s fiasco of what acceptable means.

exploraz |root |parent |next |previous [-]

(relevant context in another submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859976)

esseph |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Been a customer for years (6ish) and this is the only outage I can remember. Others may have happened but they weren't significant enough me to notice

surgical_fire |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I have been a Proton user for the past 4 years.

No complaints so far.

tossandthrow |root |parent |previous [-]

Proton is horrible. Notoriously bad email service.

I ended it after they only sent half my email to my accountant because they would apparently send the server saved draft version, which was not made current when I clicked send.

RetroTechie |previous [-]

Created an account there some months ago, logged in & checked my email a # of times since then.

Plz someone tell me that didn't contribute to this outage! Didn't intend to cause trouble for anyone.

johnbarron |root |parent [-]

Depends...how large were your attachments?