We recently experienced a system-wide outage that affected both developers and API providers. We have identified and solved the problem.
While the issue is resolved now, we’d like to thank you again for your patience here and apologize again for the inconvenience. All systems should be set from here! If you have any additional issues, we are on-call and here to help. Please email support@rapidapi.com or leave your comments below.
If you are interested in learning more about why this issue occurred, see below:
Technical Explanation
We host API keys and subscriptions on a Redis database and rely on a third party (RedisLabs) to access them in real-time. Last night, RedisLabs throttled our service, which caused outages on our side. The RedisLabs issue is resolved, but we are taking proactive steps to ensure that our system is not affected should another issue on their side occur. Moving forward, we are building additional fail-safe redundancies to ensure that these errors do not occur again.
Moving Forward
Thanks for your patience today and we apologize again for this issue. We know that many of you host APIs or apps on our service and that these outages affect your business. We are taking active steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again and look forward to any feedback that you provide about this process.
While outages like these are rare, we want to give better visibility around them. Visit our new RapidAPI status page to see any issues as they appear in real-time. We’ve built this page based on today’s incident and hope it will be helpful to you in the future.
Shits happen, we all know that but you lacked communication at all.
There was no status update on your side, no Twitter posts, no info whatsoever.
Users were getting angry because they were not aware that it was not my fault and they’re gonna unsubscribe. It was very hard from my side to assert that it was a general outage and it was not my fault.
An outage of about a whole day can’t be handled this way.
I agree maxcanna. Thankfully, as a subscriber and not a creator, I was savvy enough to check a number of the free APIs and could see it was a system-wide issue and not the APIs I subscribe to.
Totally agree on the lack of communication though. I tweeted Mashape (who my contract/payments are with) and got an abrupt reply of “nothing to do with us”. No reply from Rapid API either on twitter or by email – until it had been fixed. Not even a “we’re aware of a problem and are working on it”.
Not the best experience…
Hi Maxcanna,
Thanks for taking the time to comment (and email us!) today. These are totally valid points. This was our first major outage and we learned a lot. I think that this is the area we would most like to improve next time something occurs.
We care about the people developing APIs and the people using them. The last thing we want to do is leave you guys hanging.
After meeting internally as a team, we have come up with the following plan in case of future outages.
1. Tweet immediately when there is an issue
2. Announce any outages or technical issues directly on both market.mashape.com and RapidAPI
3. Maintain a RapidAPI status page so that developers and API providers can check the status or RapidAPI 24/7.
You can access the status page now at: http://stats.pingdom.com/hqdija2dlngx
Please feel free to email me at support@rapidapi.com if there is anything else we can do to help you communicate this issue to your users. We are happy to draft an email to them that explains things more clearly.
Thanks again for your comments,
Lindsey
Hi MaFT,
I’m sure you saw our response to Maxcanna, but thought we would take the time to thank you for your comment! It’s very helpful for us to hear your thoughts. You’re right. This is not the best experience, both in terms of the outage and communications.
We have detailed a plan on how to do better next time and have learned a lot from this experience. Let us know what you think!
Also, if you ever want to check the status of RapidAPI.com, you can check this website: http://stats.pingdom.com/hqdija2dlngx
Feel free to reach out to us at support@rapidapi.com if you have any additional thoughts or feedback. We’d love to hear from you.
-Lindsey