The cloud-based, article-saving service Instapaper experienced more than a day of downtime and will be working to restore its full-service levels for weeks after running into a problem with its cloud database provider, according to the company.
The service is back online after 31 hours of downtime, but only articles saved since Dec. 20, 2016 can be accessed, Instapaper notified its users in an email. The service offers mobile apps and web browser extensions that allows users to save online articles for later reading. As it neatly sums up in its motto, “Save anything. Read anywhere.”
The outage began at 12:30 PM PST on Feb. 8, Instapaper explained on its blog. The root of the problem is a limit that was hit with a hosted database.
“It appears we hit a system limit for our hosted database that’s preventing new articles from being saved,” the blog states. “Our only option is to export all data from our old database and import it into a new one. We expect to be fully recovered today.”
Instapaper goes on to apologize to its users and points to its record of being up for 99.3 per cent of all of 2016.
Instapaper doesn’t identify its cloud services provider for the hosted database, but says that it spent “hours on the phone” with them to resolve the issue. In the comments under the blog post, moderator Brian Donohue says that no warning was received for nearing the database threshold, though some details about it were provided in an online resources section.
Instapaper says that it expects to have its full archives of stored articles available to users by Feb. 17 at the latest.
