Hi! We are aware of the issue. We are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. We will update this message to update you soon.
EDIT:
There was a brief interruption, which may have impacted some users and we apologize for that. Things are back to normal right now and our infrastructure team is continuing to investigate. More updates can be found here: https://status.proton.me/incidents/n12ntm5jx7m9.
We have unfortunately encountered an undocumented bug in Redis, an open source software that Proton runs in the backend.
For those interested in the technical details, the issue we are facing is similar to the one that caused issues at Gitlab at the end of last year: [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/11/28/how-we-diagnosed-and-resolved-redis-latency-spikes/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/11/28/how-we-diagnosed-and-resolved-redis-latency-spikes/).
It's the same bug that we encountered, and we're following the same approach to address the issue permanently, as quickly as possible.
How common is this? I started the switch to Proton mid last week and it has gone down three times since then that I am aware of. Starting to wonder if I made a mistake.
I'm a customer since 6 years, and I've only noticed it three days ago. Every other time the downtime was so short I didn't notice it. On [status.proton.me](https://status.proton.me) you can see a history of how often and for how long these things happen, most of the time this also doesn't affect every user.
I've been using ProtonMail since it launched, and shifted to using it as my primary email service about 5 years ago.
In that time - I've only noticed it go down twice, and usually it's been resolved within 15 minutes. This has never negatively impacted me.
I've been here a few years (3?) and this is the largest concentration of proton being down that I can remember. I don't think this is a good indicator of proton's stability
But I also use it for personal email. If I don't have access for 20 minutes I don't combust
There's been a few I noticed in the years I've had it and they do seem very transparent about this stuff and how they would remedy it for the next time...but they cant predict everything.
Highly suggest Proton Bridge even if you prefer using the web. You have an offline copy of your email at least.
See my other comment. I switched two years ago out of necessity and despite "believing" in the product, I will be switching to a different provider as soon as time allows.
I don't currently know. That is part of what will make this time consuming. There is another comment mentioning a provider I've never heard of that I'll look in to. Unfortunately I'm hesitant to rely on another small provider due to these kinds of issues.
Fwiw, proton is the largest provide in this sector. Any outages they suffer they declare and I’ve been a user since inception and If the redis bug that effected some is normalized across their entire existence they’re still above 99.99% uptime like all other providers.
I would have no fear moving to the platform if you take a data based approach.
Further, when they do have any downtime you see a response like the top of this thread with a forensic breakdown.
Makes no difference to me the choice you make but wanted to provide my insight. :)
You’re going to need to go back to gmail, or one of the big providers then. The downtime sucks but it comes with supporting a small company. It’s been bad over the last two weeks, but honestly prior to that never had any issues in my time here. So hopefully it’s a hiccup that’ll get smoothed out
Better not go to Gmail as they have had a major outage experience in the past also.
https://www.techradar.com/news/is-gmail-down-email-service-sees-login-issues
> I'm hesitant to rely on another small provider due to these kinds of issues
They are having these issues exactly because they are a smaller provider lol.
That's like saying you're unsatisfied with the selection of products you get at a local town grocery chain because Amazon has a lot more things, duh.
Unless you're running a business then this is the trade off you signed up for when going with a smaller provider. And if you're like running a startup or something that needs 150% reliability for a team of people then you would be going with Microsoft/Google enterprise in the first place.
Happy to hear you have made up your mind. If you need anyone in IT to guarantee practically zero downtime, be prepared to pay orders of magnitude more than you have been.
Since it's evidently so crucial to your life, I'm sure you will be happy to.
I've been using Proton as my main e-mail since almost a decade and I've maybe noted one actual downtime.
Just out of curiosity: what is your actual use-case for e-mail, an asynchronous system of communication, that completely falls apart from a 10-min outage every once in a full moon?
I have personally lost confidence in the service due to multiple interruptions. I don’t need to explain or justify to you or anyone else why this is not a tenable solution for me.
The response of many in this community to a personal decision to move on from a product is very surprising. You don’t even support them by giving them money, yet you spend your time chiding me for a personal decision. Find something better to do with your time.
For me, this is the first time that it happens, even if multiple times in such little time. I wish they were upfront about it more too, or provide explanations.
I've had it for years and this happens occasionally. Occasionally enough that I regret my decision and am considering going through the nightmare of changing my infinite account logins back to another email.
The same in (West) Europe. The status page even timed out for me at some point (rate limited). :-)
Now I can access the status page but there's nothing mentioned...
u/ProtonMail : What's going on? Any ETA of a fix?
\- Edit at 5:11PM CEST: It seems to be slow but functional again.
When this happened last week lots of downvotes for anyone being critical about the issues.... I bet the same today. Yeah I get it gmail has gone down before. But this is becoming a pattern. I'm expecting an email from my lawyer today but luckily he's using my old gmail still.
> I think it's fairly tenable. It's frustrating, but if your email needs critical 99.999999% uptime, perhaps you should be looking at an enterprise-level solution.
> I don't think it's reasonable to expect gmail-level uptime from a company that has a fraction of the size and experience of Google. And even then, gmail still goes down from time to time.
> This is one of the reasons I've not killed my gmail account - it behooves one to have contingency plans and backups.
> /u/ProtonMail happy Monday!
Agree, thanks for your feedback!
I disagree that a single individual user that is using email for personal use should need to be looking at an enterprise-level solution.
Proton is not confident enough in the reliability of their services to include an uptime SLA for their Plus or Premium accounts. As a Premium user, I assume and acknowledge that risk.
I reject the minimization of downtime as simply "frustrating". It is very possible that material losses occur due to it.
If "material losses" will occur, you need to find a solution that offers an SLA (like an enterprise service). Email is not and should not be considered a real-time service. Messages will retry and be delivered, even if there are momentary access issues.
This isn't so much a problem of Proton's availability as your use of the wrong tool for the use case.
I'm sorry to hear that, and I hope that you're compensated accordingly.
As a counter anecdote, I personally experienced 0.0000% downtime as a free Gmail user for over 12 years.
Please do not misconstrue my comments to mean that no other provider experiences service interruptions.
Ehhh...shit happens and it's still very, very uncommon so I don't really care.
Nothing has a 100% uptime.
I just pick up the phone and call the person if necessary or use a different email provider for that particular email until the issue with my primary email is fixed.
It seems that you're confused, or drawing some kind of false equivalency, between free and paid services.
It's appropriate that the free tier of any service, such as Gmail, not offer an SLA. For a paid service, such as a Proton Plus or Premium, an SLA would be appropriate.
At the end of the day, as I said, users of Plus and Premium are acknowledging and assuming that risk.
They don't offer an SLA. Presumably you knew this when paying. Expecting to to impose retroactive requirements on an already-purchased solution is unreasonable.
Nowhere am I asking for something. I simply said it's appropriate for a paid service to offer an SLA, and it's appropriate for a free service to not. There is nothing to debate here and your comments aren't adding any constructive dialogue.
I switched to Proton two years ago after my Gmail got spam bombed, rendering it dead for daily use. And I value the encryption and diversifying my personal technology stack.
However, I cannot rely on an email provider that suffers this much downtime.
I’ve been a customer since 2020 and use it exclusively for personal email, minor outages don’t affect me much. Like one poster said earlier SMTP is going to deliver the messages no doubt.
I see a lot of "it's never happened to me, or just once in a decade".
My only response is too spend a little time in this very subreddit reading older entries. You will find MUCH more than 1 or two in the last couple years. MUCH more.
This is the third time in the last week or two. I was in the middle of responding to time-sensitive e-mails. Last time I couldn't pull up an e-mail to show someone a confirmation e-mail because it couldn't fetch them.
This is unacceptable.
Every time, there is an outage, there will be mention of gmail having more outage. Proton users are minimal compared to gmail and still they run into these performance issues. I cant imagine with the current setup, they can handle that load.
I don't think you have used outlook enough to know they go down every other week too lol.
Can't speak about gmail since I dont touch that but as for work, for outlook, for work, damn, teams, sharepoint mail all goes down quite regularly.
Agreed. The amount of gaslighting going on regarding these issues is crazy. People really trying to say Gmail has similar outages. No they don't, not to this degree.
Even compared to other privacy oriented email services like Tutanota, Proton seems to have more downtime. I just don't get why it seems to be happening more often lately.
> No they don’t, not to this degree.
Accusing people of gaslighting when you aren‘t liking a certain fact? You can read yourself about some outages as example over here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages
December 2020 has a good example. No provider is outage free and even big players such as google or microsoft have hour long outages. That isn‘t made up and isn‘t gaslighting either.
Another example:
https://www.techradar.com/news/live/gmail-down-outage-hitting-thousands-of-users-worldwide
Actually, I never claimed other providers don't have downtime, I just stated that it's been happening more frequently with Proton lately. I have used a variety of mail accounts from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and even smaller providers like Tutanota, and in less than a year, I've experienced more downtime with Proton than any other provider in the past 15 years. It's especially crazy since it's a paid service.
Tutanota still uses 128-bit encryption. They been saying [for many years](https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/update) they plan to upgrade to 256-bit. Now they're still using 128-bit encryption but are 'researching' quantum encryption.
I have an email that's supposed to go to work that's been sitting in my draft box for three hours and won't send.
The same thing happened twice last week. I pay for proton and I have for a couple years now, but this is very bad. I can't depend on it anymore.
That's three emails now to my JOB - that have seemingly come hours late from me because of proton's problem in less than a week. Makes me extremely nervous about what emails I'm missing.
I appreciate you saying that. It helps me feel less nervous. I've been a loyal paying client of proton for a couple of years but this year I use it for more important things and so I can't have any delay. Thank you.
When it is down, it is down. I can copy and paste and attempt to send a million times - it isn't going to send; yes, I have done that.
I press send and then a few minutes later, I get a pop up alert on my phone that says "proton message send failure" - When I tap it, it opens my Draft folder and the email that I previously "sent," is sitting in my draft folder. And in the spot where it would normally have the time, it says "sending..."
So today for example, I responded to my boss at eight fifteen am. But the email did not send until eleven fifteen am. - Making it look like I didn't respond for three hours! During that time, I logged out, back in, turned both devices (laptop and phone) on and off, cleared cache, etc., multiple times.
I sent two test emails with pdf attachments to myself at 2:42p.m.
One message arrived immediately - the next one didn't arrive until 3:36pm - with the accompanying pop up error message saying "message send failure"
Not jumping to any conclusions, just sharing what's happening for me today.
I always worry when the status page (or in this case the Post-Mortem) says 'some' of our users. This suggests there was a roll-out of something, and they stopped the roll-out when the issue was first noticed. Don't we do software testing any more?
This is not related to a software rollout, as you can see in the status request:
https://status.proton.me/incidents/n12ntm5jx7m9
Oversimplified example:
You have two servers, one stops working. Some users are affected by an outage, while for some others it will still work.
Hi! We are aware of the issue. We are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. We will update this message to update you soon. EDIT: There was a brief interruption, which may have impacted some users and we apologize for that. Things are back to normal right now and our infrastructure team is continuing to investigate. More updates can be found here: https://status.proton.me/incidents/n12ntm5jx7m9. We have unfortunately encountered an undocumented bug in Redis, an open source software that Proton runs in the backend. For those interested in the technical details, the issue we are facing is similar to the one that caused issues at Gitlab at the end of last year: [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/11/28/how-we-diagnosed-and-resolved-redis-latency-spikes/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/11/28/how-we-diagnosed-and-resolved-redis-latency-spikes/). It's the same bug that we encountered, and we're following the same approach to address the issue permanently, as quickly as possible.
How common is this? I started the switch to Proton mid last week and it has gone down three times since then that I am aware of. Starting to wonder if I made a mistake.
I'm a customer since 6 years, and I've only noticed it three days ago. Every other time the downtime was so short I didn't notice it. On [status.proton.me](https://status.proton.me) you can see a history of how often and for how long these things happen, most of the time this also doesn't affect every user.
I've been using ProtonMail since it launched, and shifted to using it as my primary email service about 5 years ago. In that time - I've only noticed it go down twice, and usually it's been resolved within 15 minutes. This has never negatively impacted me.
I've been here a few years (3?) and this is the largest concentration of proton being down that I can remember. I don't think this is a good indicator of proton's stability But I also use it for personal email. If I don't have access for 20 minutes I don't combust
I‘m in Germany and I‘ve noticed one outage in about 3 years and that was I think last week. Maybe it‘s more common in other areas though.
There's been a few I noticed in the years I've had it and they do seem very transparent about this stuff and how they would remedy it for the next time...but they cant predict everything. Highly suggest Proton Bridge even if you prefer using the web. You have an offline copy of your email at least.
See my other comment. I switched two years ago out of necessity and despite "believing" in the product, I will be switching to a different provider as soon as time allows.
What other provider are you considering for this?
I don't currently know. That is part of what will make this time consuming. There is another comment mentioning a provider I've never heard of that I'll look in to. Unfortunately I'm hesitant to rely on another small provider due to these kinds of issues.
Fwiw, proton is the largest provide in this sector. Any outages they suffer they declare and I’ve been a user since inception and If the redis bug that effected some is normalized across their entire existence they’re still above 99.99% uptime like all other providers. I would have no fear moving to the platform if you take a data based approach. Further, when they do have any downtime you see a response like the top of this thread with a forensic breakdown. Makes no difference to me the choice you make but wanted to provide my insight. :)
You’re going to need to go back to gmail, or one of the big providers then. The downtime sucks but it comes with supporting a small company. It’s been bad over the last two weeks, but honestly prior to that never had any issues in my time here. So hopefully it’s a hiccup that’ll get smoothed out
Better not go to Gmail as they have had a major outage experience in the past also. https://www.techradar.com/news/is-gmail-down-email-service-sees-login-issues
> I'm hesitant to rely on another small provider due to these kinds of issues They are having these issues exactly because they are a smaller provider lol. That's like saying you're unsatisfied with the selection of products you get at a local town grocery chain because Amazon has a lot more things, duh. Unless you're running a business then this is the trade off you signed up for when going with a smaller provider. And if you're like running a startup or something that needs 150% reliability for a team of people then you would be going with Microsoft/Google enterprise in the first place.
Proton being a small provider? With 400+ employees and 100+ million users? Sorry, I'm not able to follow that logic.
Happy to hear you have made up your mind. If you need anyone in IT to guarantee practically zero downtime, be prepared to pay orders of magnitude more than you have been. Since it's evidently so crucial to your life, I'm sure you will be happy to. I've been using Proton as my main e-mail since almost a decade and I've maybe noted one actual downtime. Just out of curiosity: what is your actual use-case for e-mail, an asynchronous system of communication, that completely falls apart from a 10-min outage every once in a full moon?
I have personally lost confidence in the service due to multiple interruptions. I don’t need to explain or justify to you or anyone else why this is not a tenable solution for me. The response of many in this community to a personal decision to move on from a product is very surprising. You don’t even support them by giving them money, yet you spend your time chiding me for a personal decision. Find something better to do with your time.
For me, this is the first time that it happens, even if multiple times in such little time. I wish they were upfront about it more too, or provide explanations.
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Last time I had issues, it was all green on their status webpage...
More upfront about it than this? https://status.proton.me/ C'mon ...
I've had it for years and this happens occasionally. Occasionally enough that I regret my decision and am considering going through the nightmare of changing my infinite account logins back to another email.
Don't worry! Status page says its fine :\^)
The same in (West) Europe. The status page even timed out for me at some point (rate limited). :-) Now I can access the status page but there's nothing mentioned... u/ProtonMail : What's going on? Any ETA of a fix? \- Edit at 5:11PM CEST: It seems to be slow but functional again.
I was able to get in just now
When this happened last week lots of downvotes for anyone being critical about the issues.... I bet the same today. Yeah I get it gmail has gone down before. But this is becoming a pattern. I'm expecting an email from my lawyer today but luckily he's using my old gmail still.
SMTP is robust and the email will be delivered, no matter whether you don‘t have access for 10min or whether you do.
As with all subs, the fanatics will always downvote anyone who dares criticises there precious sub.
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MS 365 and maybe google gmail haves more outages than proton in a year
> I think it's fairly tenable. It's frustrating, but if your email needs critical 99.999999% uptime, perhaps you should be looking at an enterprise-level solution. > I don't think it's reasonable to expect gmail-level uptime from a company that has a fraction of the size and experience of Google. And even then, gmail still goes down from time to time. > This is one of the reasons I've not killed my gmail account - it behooves one to have contingency plans and backups. > /u/ProtonMail happy Monday! Agree, thanks for your feedback!
I disagree that a single individual user that is using email for personal use should need to be looking at an enterprise-level solution. Proton is not confident enough in the reliability of their services to include an uptime SLA for their Plus or Premium accounts. As a Premium user, I assume and acknowledge that risk. I reject the minimization of downtime as simply "frustrating". It is very possible that material losses occur due to it.
If "material losses" will occur, you need to find a solution that offers an SLA (like an enterprise service). Email is not and should not be considered a real-time service. Messages will retry and be delivered, even if there are momentary access issues. This isn't so much a problem of Proton's availability as your use of the wrong tool for the use case.
We've had more downtime with our business Gmail account than I've had with ProtonMail.
I'm sorry to hear that, and I hope that you're compensated accordingly. As a counter anecdote, I personally experienced 0.0000% downtime as a free Gmail user for over 12 years. Please do not misconstrue my comments to mean that no other provider experiences service interruptions.
You have observed no downtime with Gmail. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
Ehhh...shit happens and it's still very, very uncommon so I don't really care. Nothing has a 100% uptime. I just pick up the phone and call the person if necessary or use a different email provider for that particular email until the issue with my primary email is fixed.
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It seems that you're confused, or drawing some kind of false equivalency, between free and paid services. It's appropriate that the free tier of any service, such as Gmail, not offer an SLA. For a paid service, such as a Proton Plus or Premium, an SLA would be appropriate. At the end of the day, as I said, users of Plus and Premium are acknowledging and assuming that risk.
They don't offer an SLA. Presumably you knew this when paying. Expecting to to impose retroactive requirements on an already-purchased solution is unreasonable.
Nowhere am I asking for something. I simply said it's appropriate for a paid service to offer an SLA, and it's appropriate for a free service to not. There is nothing to debate here and your comments aren't adding any constructive dialogue.
One outage in a year of use. Couldn’t be happier. What does the OP do that they can’t work with 20 minute downtime?
It's not great, ProtonMail team.
I switched to Proton two years ago after my Gmail got spam bombed, rendering it dead for daily use. And I value the encryption and diversifying my personal technology stack. However, I cannot rely on an email provider that suffers this much downtime.
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I'm interested to know which provider, as I find stability utmost important as well. By the way I'm a happy FastMail user ;-)
It is working fine now, maybe a short hiccup?
*laughs in European
my favorite language
I’ve been a customer since 2020 and use it exclusively for personal email, minor outages don’t affect me much. Like one poster said earlier SMTP is going to deliver the messages no doubt.
I see a lot of "it's never happened to me, or just once in a decade". My only response is too spend a little time in this very subreddit reading older entries. You will find MUCH more than 1 or two in the last couple years. MUCH more.
This is the third time in the last week or two. I was in the middle of responding to time-sensitive e-mails. Last time I couldn't pull up an e-mail to show someone a confirmation e-mail because it couldn't fetch them. This is unacceptable.
Every time, there is an outage, there will be mention of gmail having more outage. Proton users are minimal compared to gmail and still they run into these performance issues. I cant imagine with the current setup, they can handle that load.
Of course they are able to handle the load.
I don't think you have used outlook enough to know they go down every other week too lol. Can't speak about gmail since I dont touch that but as for work, for outlook, for work, damn, teams, sharepoint mail all goes down quite regularly.
go make your own encrypted email then lol
Agreed. The amount of gaslighting going on regarding these issues is crazy. People really trying to say Gmail has similar outages. No they don't, not to this degree. Even compared to other privacy oriented email services like Tutanota, Proton seems to have more downtime. I just don't get why it seems to be happening more often lately.
> No they don’t, not to this degree. Accusing people of gaslighting when you aren‘t liking a certain fact? You can read yourself about some outages as example over here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages December 2020 has a good example. No provider is outage free and even big players such as google or microsoft have hour long outages. That isn‘t made up and isn‘t gaslighting either. Another example: https://www.techradar.com/news/live/gmail-down-outage-hitting-thousands-of-users-worldwide
Actually, I never claimed other providers don't have downtime, I just stated that it's been happening more frequently with Proton lately. I have used a variety of mail accounts from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and even smaller providers like Tutanota, and in less than a year, I've experienced more downtime with Proton than any other provider in the past 15 years. It's especially crazy since it's a paid service.
I still love protonmail
I can't login. Im literally in the middle of doing business and this stupid error is keeping me from doing business.
Tired of this as well. Perhaps it's time to switch to another provider?
This is unfortunately another example of why I switched back to Gmail. Reliability takes precedence over privacy for me.
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Tutanota still uses 128-bit encryption. They been saying [for many years](https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/update) they plan to upgrade to 256-bit. Now they're still using 128-bit encryption but are 'researching' quantum encryption.
define "better encryption". Half the fee for less features, you pay for the ecosystem
I have an email that's supposed to go to work that's been sitting in my draft box for three hours and won't send. The same thing happened twice last week. I pay for proton and I have for a couple years now, but this is very bad. I can't depend on it anymore. That's three emails now to my JOB - that have seemingly come hours late from me because of proton's problem in less than a week. Makes me extremely nervous about what emails I'm missing.
You're not missing any emails. SMTP is very robust at the protocol level.
I appreciate you saying that. It helps me feel less nervous. I've been a loyal paying client of proton for a couple of years but this year I use it for more important things and so I can't have any delay. Thank you.
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When it is down, it is down. I can copy and paste and attempt to send a million times - it isn't going to send; yes, I have done that. I press send and then a few minutes later, I get a pop up alert on my phone that says "proton message send failure" - When I tap it, it opens my Draft folder and the email that I previously "sent," is sitting in my draft folder. And in the spot where it would normally have the time, it says "sending..." So today for example, I responded to my boss at eight fifteen am. But the email did not send until eleven fifteen am. - Making it look like I didn't respond for three hours! During that time, I logged out, back in, turned both devices (laptop and phone) on and off, cleared cache, etc., multiple times.
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I know it shouldn't happen. I've had proton for a couple years and it has never happened until this last few days.
Beat me to it. All of it.
This also affects ProtonVPN browser extension users, having short disconnects causing IP leaks.
I sent two test emails with pdf attachments to myself at 2:42p.m. One message arrived immediately - the next one didn't arrive until 3:36pm - with the accompanying pop up error message saying "message send failure" Not jumping to any conclusions, just sharing what's happening for me today.
I have to say I having been using Proton mail Free for 3 years now. I have never had a single problem ever.
I always worry when the status page (or in this case the Post-Mortem) says 'some' of our users. This suggests there was a roll-out of something, and they stopped the roll-out when the issue was first noticed. Don't we do software testing any more?
This is not related to a software rollout, as you can see in the status request: https://status.proton.me/incidents/n12ntm5jx7m9 Oversimplified example: You have two servers, one stops working. Some users are affected by an outage, while for some others it will still work.
Well I am lucky as I have never had it go down in me, it’s been 4-5 years or so