Digsby is down. No it is not you.
So my favorite IM client/IM communicator on AtA stopped working this morning. At first I thought it was me. I kept getting an error on the desktop client. It was simply failed to connect.
I had recently introduced my buddy over @ Bauer-Power.net to Digsby so I went to his website and saw this:
Are you using Digsby? Is it working for you? Are you a Digsby developer? Then let us know what’s going on in the comments!
UPDATE From Digsby:
We are having server-side issues that brought down the service. We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly. If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.
After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week. This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurrence!
11:52 Update: The digsby site is not coming up anymore and the information that was at http://blog.digsby.com/archives/121 is also 404’ing
3:20 Update: They just posted an update (and spelled dependent wrong!):
We are working to restore the databases now so we can bring the servers back online. Part of the team is meeting right now to discuss the implementation of “local mode” so the client is not dependant on servers.




February 9, 2009 - 8:30 am
I thought it was just me! Thanks ATA!
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February 9, 2009 - 9:20 am
Its down for me as well. Glad I found your site, I figured it was my router so I’ve been resetting, etc. Digby is usually stable and I trust these guys to fix it.
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February 9, 2009 - 9:50 am
Its pretty terrible architecture if Digsby’s gateway service to go down and you can’t use their app. If they want people to switch to their client, its not a good idea to have any outages and force me to use another IM client in the mean time.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I agree Justin. I have been praising and preaching Digsby for months now. And I am patiently waiting for it to come back up.
By patiently I mean using another service at the moment and hoping I don’t have to switch permanently!
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February 9, 2009 - 10:31 am
Thanks for posting this. I use it while at work and I will just pull up a regular AIM client for the time being.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 10:45 am
As of 2pm we are still down and the website is having horrible problems.
Still no new updates from Digsby…
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February 9, 2009 - 11:30 am
This has been a huge PITA, I use Digsby for work too, going back to Trillian has not been fun as Trillian doesn’t pop up message notifications (a VERY handy feature for me).
I wonder if their servers were compromised?
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February 9, 2009 - 11:36 am
This certainly shows some poor architectural design on the software writers part. I could see some reduced services if Digsby is down, but they could (and SHOULD) allow IM connections to the IM servers (Yahoo!, MSN, Google, AIM, etc) if connection to their server times out.
This is almost certainly a show-stopper for a lot of people to be at the whim of a central server — no matter _how_ stable it might have been over the past year.
I think I might go back to my old IM client software until I see Digsby say they’ve made changes to the login handling mechanism. Our developers at work rely on IM to send info and ask questions with each other. I can’t wait all day for Digsby to try to fix their servers.
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corradizo Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
IMO,Digsby is a nice to have… No one owes you uptime unless you pay for it. So if you don’t want to pay have a back up handy like meebo or trillian or whatever else will do your bidding.
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February 9, 2009 - 11:52 am
I’m not 100% familiar with the architecture, but does Digsby keep a local cache of your contact list and settings? And doesn’t it connect directly to each IM service? Seems like logging into the central Digsby server shouldn’t be a prerequisite to getting online.
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I believe it just logs you into each service and pushes all the data through their client.
I wasn’t bothered by its architecture until it stopped working and it is now 3:30pm EST and it has been down all day!
I can hear digsby users running away… Sad.Very sad.
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Jeff Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I used to be a diehard Trillian Pro user, upgraded to Astra and was loving it until their development schedule lagged so bad and the bugs became intolerable.
Since then I’ve been hooked on Digsby, and it is definitely a shame about the downtime. Overall, it’s been a wonderful experience; I especially love the Facebook and Twitter integrations.
Sounds like they are going to be addressing the single-point-of-failure issue, so I guess that’s the good news!
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February 9, 2009 - 11:55 am
I just installed Digsby last night after reading up on some reviews. This is not an auspicious beginning. It is also the second issue I have had in the last 15 hours. I have only had it for 15 hours. I can certainly understand some minor connection issues, but all day? It’s 2pm central time here, and it still isn’t up. I’m not sure that I’ll be keeping this.
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February 9, 2009 - 12:15 pm
They just posted an update (and spelled dependent wrong!):
Update (2:00pm 2/9/2009): We are working to restore the databases now so we can bring the servers back online. Part of the team is meeting right now to discuss the implementation of “local mode” so the client is not dependant on servers.
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February 9, 2009 - 2:45 pm
When Digsby goes down, I lose a major part of my computer experience. Of course, like they said, it’s been years of solid uptime, and a few hiccups for a free-to-use product is acceptable.
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February 9, 2009 - 2:48 pm
They have removed their blog and support with the following comment:
We’ll be back shortly.
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February 9, 2009 - 2:55 pm
Ive been following the problem and this is the last thing that they post in digby’s blog Primary database is online and synchronizing to other nodes. We hope to be online within an hour.
Was posted about 2 hours ago
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Paco Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
New update, Databases still synchronizing. The last 20% is taking as long as the first 80% unfortunately.
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February 9, 2009 - 2:59 pm
Yeah, I blogged about this too here. I am going into withdrawals. I am using portable pidgin, and BeTwittered for crying out loud!
Digsby! Look at what you have reduced me to!
-EDP
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El Di Pablo Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
WTF is up with my link? LOL! Here is my blog post! [Digsby Goes Down]
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February 9, 2009 - 3:32 pm
Yeah.. definitely disappointed about Digsby. I wasn’t too concerned when they went down (and actually being off IM services has made for a productive day) but when they say ‘one more hour’ I expect just an hour, or at least an updated time later… not something that looks like a sign on a storefront that the owner has abandoned. I hope this isn’t the end of Digsby.
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February 9, 2009 - 3:32 pm
its back up!
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February 9, 2009 - 3:40 pm
I wonder how many users will walk…
-EDP
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Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Well I for one went right back to Digsbying…
Hows about you?
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Dan Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Same ^_^ Too good to stay away from.
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Joey Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Agreed. Digsby is the shit. I was mad for a little bit but I came right back!!
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El Di Pablo Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Oh yeah, I’m still with Digsby :-)
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Mike Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Oh yeah me 2. ;)
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