What causes dropbox Dropbox to go down for about 2 days?

Dropbox of the cloud storage service was downed on January 11, 2014 Japan time, and the service fell into a state that can not be accessed. The service has been restored by 9:40 on January 13th and Dropbox is an official blog announcing that the cause is due to a periodic update bug and that the user's data is safe .

Dropbox Tech Blog »Blog Archive» Outage post-mortem
https://tech.dropbox.com/2014/01/outage-post-mortem/


According to the official blog, it is said that a failure occurred due to the regular update of the machine OS, which took place from 10:30 on January 11, 2014 in Japan time. Dropbox uses thousands of databases, and two replica machines are used for redundancy in addition to the master machine, but due to bugs contained in the update script, reinstallation of the OS As a result, the server stopped and service became unusable.

About 3 hours after the service stopped, almost all services were restored from backup, but "About 5% of users can not synchronize from the desktop" or "Approximately 20% of users are using Dropbox Mobile Because it left problems such as "Can not connect from application", the complete restoration was 9:40 on 13th on 2nd. Since the active database was not included in the stopped database this time, there was no data leakage or loss.


In addition to apologizing deeply for this service down, Dropbox strengthens the check function before the reception command of the machine is executed and can respond to quick recovery from MySQL backup of a large data sizeDisaster RecoveryWe have also announced that we have developed a tool.

ByEugenio Tiengo

By the way,Ars TechnicaPointed out the possibility that part of the problem report that was carried out at the time of restoration after 3 hours from the server down was a counterfeit complaint from the hacking group about the cause that took two days to complete recovery of the service However, Dropbox denies that it is due to the internal cause to the last.