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]
Top Rated Comments
I understand that Instapaper is massive and using cloud services is the best way to scale, but this response really concerns me:
[doublepost=1486751255][/doublepost]That was fun to read. :) Very big deal... beer recipes. :)
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.
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.