Runbox down for 3+ hours
 

POP & webmail. Anybody else has better news? All systems down according to https://status.runbox.com/

yep. Still down. Systems going up and down all day. Never seen this before.

Just about everything is down at 06:30 on 5th March and has been since 13:30 on 4th. V little info on service status site. Very disappointing - both the long outage and the lack of information from Runbox themselves.

Can anyone who has any contact with them throw any light on the situation?

Hardware problems. And again, they don't keep their customers informed. They never learn.

Not quite.
From https://status.runbox.com/2026/03/04...cess-issues-5/

There is much more information earlier in that page.

I guess I owe a reluctant apology - when I look at the status page, I see the nodeping table and a message from 2pm yesterday. It didn't occur to me that the message title might be a link to further information. I'm not exactly new to this Internet thing so maybe I should have realised but other links on the page are underlined. A "click here for latest" might be helpful.

According to nodeping just about everything is down and the statements about email being accessible if slow, are not my experience.

This is not the first time Runbox has been down. I have decided to move elsewhere - it really isn't good enough.

I use my own domain with Runbox and have transferred all the DNS records to point to my new provider, Fastmail. I'm hoping I will still be able to migrate my existing Runbox messages to Fastmail - but with the Runbox systems being down I can't attempt that yet.

Thu 11:16 GMT: webmail up. Imap, pop and smtp still down.
See https://status.runbox.com/

Even though it says IMAP is still down I managed to do a migration from Runbox to Fastmail and all my emails have been preserved. Phew!

I log in (webmail) without any problems.

A 24hr plus outage is really very poor. No proper explanation either. Very disappointing.

Still no explanation of what happened. I think we are owed something or am I being unreasonable?

They did promise that.

They did .... and it's nearly a week ago now.

They have now published a blog entry with details of what happened. Seems comprehensive. Not being au fait with the technology involved, I can't draw any conclusions. .

https://blog.runbox.com/2026/03/post...arch-4th-2026/

Hopefully, they're better prepared for future issues

This is very similar to the week long outage Fastmail had about a decade and a half ago (started with multiple disk failures)

From user reports here and in other online places it seems this outage lasted a lot longer than the 24+ hours they state. Not really relevant to their problems, but this type of thing is one reason I have moved almost all of my own personal digital life into the "cloud." When much larger and more sophisticated managed hardware fails like this it shows what can happen to us personal computer users. My mind wanders back to an incident several years ago where my office building was hit by lightning resulting in a large pile of fried computers and other digital hardware.

Isn't Runbox the cloud? What's the difference?

My post was confusing. What I meant was seeing a company like Runbox taken down by hardware failure nakes me even more convinced that the average person should not rely on their own local servers and and NAS backups, etc. Too unreliable. One fire or flood and everything is kaput. I keep as much as possible in the cloud with some local backups, but my main file storage, photos, email, etc. is all store in the cloud, and I only use the biggest, safest clouds, like Google. And, never run your own local email server!

Does Proton sit in that same category?

I've only used Proton Drive a bit. It seemed fine, but definitely slower than Google Drive. I've tried a bunch of others, including the big ones like Dropbox, OneDrive, and iCloud. Google Drive performs the best.