Dropbox is experiencing 'issues'

We hope you weren't planning a big Dropbox sync this evening. The cloud storage service reports that it's having problems with its site following an issue with "routine internal maintenance." Just what that means isn't yet clear, although it's not believed to be an intrusion attempt. While Anonymous Korea and 1775 Sec claim to have hacked Dropbox, the company tells Engadget that the outage isn't the result of "external factors." That news won't be much consolation to those who still can't reach their online data, but it at least suggests that users won't have to worry about changing their passwords.

Update: Dropbox says that its site is back -- as expected, it adds that claims of a leak are a "hoax."

Update 2: A few days later, Dropbox has explained what happened. It was attempting to upgrade operating systems when a scripting bug reinstalled a number of active machines, bringing down Dropbox's service in the process. The company restored its core functionality within about three hours of the failure, but it took until Monday to get all its databases running smoothly. If this ever happens again, though, Dropbox will be prepared -- it built a tool that will let it recover much more quickly.


Dropbox goes down following problem with 'routine maintenance' (update 2: what happened)