Dropbox outage: what happened and where things stand
On Friday, January 10, Dropbox experienced a service outage that began at approximately 6:40pm PT. The incident was caused during routine internal maintenance and was not the result of external factors. The Dropbox site was restored by 8:36pm PT that same evening.
Claims of leaked user data were unfounded
Following the restoration of service, rumors circulated claiming that user information had been compromised during the incident. Dropbox confirmed that these claims were a hoax. No user files were lost at any point during the outage.
Recovery timeline and lingering issues
While the site returned quickly, full recovery took considerably longer. Dropbox engineers continued working through the night and over the following days to address residual issues affecting a subset of users. Progress updates were posted regularly on the status blog.
Several features were temporarily affected during the recovery period:
- The Photos tab on dropbox.com was disabled for all users, and photo sharing was turned off temporarily. Photos remained accessible through the Files tab on dropbox.com and via the desktop client.
- Approximately 5% of users experienced syncing problems from the desktop client.
- About 20% of users had trouble accessing Dropbox through mobile apps.
Restoring full service
By the morning of Sunday, January 12, more than 99% of users could access their files on dropbox.com. The company said it was rolling out a change within hours of that update that would further improve the experience for users still facing syncing and mobile app issues.
As of 7:23pm PT on January 12, Dropbox reported that the service was running for all users, with a few remaining issues related specifically to the photos tab. The company stated that it was continuing to work through those final issues.
