14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox had some technical issues over this past weekend, with the service going down for up to 48 hours for some users. Despite rumors that the downtime was caused by hackers, the company denied everything and went on to explain exactly what happened.
“On Friday evening our service went down during scheduled maintenance. The service was back up and running about three hours later, with core service fully restored by 4:40 PM PT on Sunday,” a blog post starts.
The company’s Akhil Gupta, a software engineer, explains that Dropbox uses thousands of databases and each has one master and two slave machines for redundancy. On Friday, during a planned maintenance, the OS on some of the machines was scheduled for update.
“A subtle bug in the script caused the command to reinstall a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down,” Gupta wrote.
He states that user files were never at risk during the outage since the databases did not contain file data, but they were used for various other features.
Dropbox then set out to perform a system recovery from backups, which is how most functionality was restored within 3 hours. However, the large size of some of the databases made recovery slower.
As soon as Dropbox went down on Friday, hackers were quick to claim that they were the ones behind the problems the service was having. A group of hackers in particular, The 1775 Sec, claimed to have compromised the service and leaked some information from Dropbox systems as proof.
It was later proved that the data came from an older leak and that nothing had in fact been stolen. Dropbox was also quick to deny all rumors and to explain the situation via Twitter. “Claims of leaked user info are a hoax. The outage was caused during internal maintenance,” the company wrote.
Dropbox has announced that it has added an additional layer of checks and a new tool that should speed up data recovery from backups to avoid such situations in the future.