Instapaper Back Online After 31-Hour Outage, Full Content Restore Will Take a Week

Friday February 10, 2017 6:44 AM PST by Mitchel Broussard
Popular bookmarking service Instapaper faced an extended outage this week, beginning at 12:30PM PT on February 8th and remaining offline for 31 hours. Although the service is now back online, users only have access to the last six weeks of saved articles, running back through December 20, 2016.

The company said it chose to restore just the last six weeks of articles right now "in the interest of coming back up as soon as possible."

A full restoration of Instapaper will take a week, so users can expect access to the rest of their data by February 17 "at the latest." Instapaper noted that the reason behind the outage appears to be a system limit that was hit for its hosted database, which prevented new articles from being saved by users.

The company apologized for the outage in its series of blog posts on the topic. It also reassured users that they "haven't lost any data" that was previously saved on Instapaper, saying that "anything you've already saved to Instapaper is safe."
We pride ourselves on being a reliable service with minimal downtime (we were up for 99.3% of 2016), and know many of you rely on Instapaper every day. We apologize that this issue has resulted in an extended period of downtime.
Last summer, Instapaper was acquired by Pinterest with the intent to use Instapaper to encourage Pinterest users to save more articles to the site. A save-for-later feature has existed for several years on Pinterest, but wasn't used very often by those on the popular pinning site.

Instapaper is available for free on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Instapaper
13 comments


Top Rated Comments

(View all)
Avatar
adamjackson
28 months ago
I know most people aren't impacted by this but this was actually a very big deal for me yesterday and continues to have an affect.

I save food recipes, things to buy, beer recipes and things to read to Instapaper. I spend an hour a day in the application or on the website. I bookmark 1-2 articles a day to blog later as well which I do blog one per day on average on my site. It's a crucial part of my workflow. I had 3 articles yesterday in my feed reader (Fever) I had to keep as unread until Instapaper came back up so I could bookmark them.

I also pay for the service. I hope the archives come back soon. I'm afraid to save anything to it for fear of losing it.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
coolfactor
28 months ago
If they hit a "database limit", it's definitely sounds like a design flaw. Rather than have data stored across multiple databases in parallel, they have everything stored in one giant database? That doesn't seem right to me.

I understand that Instapaper is massive and using cloud services is the best way to scale, but this response really concerns me:

After spending multiple hours on the phone with our cloud service provider, it appears we hit a system limit for our hosted database that’s preventing new articles from being saved. At this time, our only option is to export all data from our old database and import it into a new one.

[doublepost=1486751255][/doublepost]

...this but this was actually a very big deal for me yesterday and continues to have an affect.

I save food recipes, things to buy, beer recipes and things to read to Instapaper. I spend an hour a day in the application or on the website. I bookmark 1-2 articles a day to blog later as well which I do blog one per day on average on my site. It's a crucial part of my workflow. ...


That was fun to read. :) Very big deal... beer recipes. :)
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
jayhawk11
28 months ago



I also pay for the service. I hope the archives come back soon. I'm afraid to save anything to it for fear of losing it.



No, you don't. Instapaper Premium went free and the feature set was given to everyone back at the beginning of November.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
adamjackson
28 months ago


That was fun to read. :) Very big deal... beer recipes. :)


I use Instapaper like some people use their Gmail Inbox or GTD application of choice. I visit the site dozens of times a day to reference things.

You picked out one thing and made fun of it but if I work for a brewery, that's sort of important to have access to that. Luckily, the mobile applications were in sync so I could reference things throughout the day but the website itself was completely down.
Rating: 1 Votes
[ Read All Comments ]