Recent Geocaching service disruptions

[+Geocaching HQ]

In recent weeks, Geocaching.com experienced brief outages and intermittent slowdowns. We understand how frustrating this is for the community. It’s frustrating for us, too, and we’re very sorry for any disruptions.

 

The recent issues are especially difficult to address because there are multiple causes. Between servers, a very large database, the many aspects of Geocaching.com, our mobile apps, API partners, and various releases that happen almost daily (ex. bug fixes, back-end improvements, not to mention bigger releases), there are a lot of services that interact with each other. If you have ever played the “Whack-a-mole” game, then you may have some understanding for what life is like for HQ’s engineers as they identify and fix problems.

 

For those reasons, we are unable to list a single reason for the recent service disruptions. But we do want you to know that our staff is working around the clock to address critical problems and reduce the likelihood of further occurrences. We added new tools to pinpoint problems and improve our internal notifications about errors. We are also adding extra server capacity, though, the recent disruptions do not appear to be caused by server or hardware problems.

 

On weekends and after work hours, engineers are always “on call” to respond to outages. In addition, we have a system in place to ping on-call engineers when automatic tests fail. Plus, our teams monitor social media and other input to gather additional information about what the issue may be (ex. Search not working, logs not posting, etc), and find fixes.

 

We truly appreciate your patience and understanding as we work through these recent issues.