Foursquare is now facing one of its worst ever service interruptions right now, the site has now been down for almost eight hours. Foursquare has had outage issues for months now, as it has struggled to keep up with surging demand.
The dominant player in the geolocation/social space has been out for nine hours so far; while staff say engineers are peering at “the light at the end of a tunnel,” we have no exact word on why the service is down or precisely when it will come back online.
Earlier today, a staffer posted on the company’s official Twitter account, “The servers are overloaded but we’re working on it! We will be back up ASAP.” This message was followed by the hashtag #caseofthemondays, a reference to a quotation from Office Space. A variant of this hashtag popped up in an update six hours later, indicating the engineering team had made little headway in repairing the server issues.
Downtime is also nothing new for Foursquare, but they have managed to be relatively stable in the past few months despite rapid growth — and new versions of the service rolling out. It would seem that whatever the issue is today, it’s probably some kind of failure in the fall-back systems that led to a total collapse.
The Foursquare website is currently displaying the the broken/sad princess, indicating that servers are being upgraded and that users should check back soon. On that note, Foursquare users everywhere have not been able to check into any places in the duration of the outage. We currently don’t know when exactly the service will be back up. The company indicates via an official tweet that they’re working on the issue, and that the service will be back up as soon as possible.
Foursquare has had outage issues for months now, as it has struggled to keep up with surging demand. But the startup recently migrated to new servers, and said it felt confident its growing pains were behind it.
Foursquare has tweeted out several notifications that it is hard at work on the problem, but hasn’t gone into specifics about the problem. We’ve reached out for comment, and will update when we know more.
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