The online organization app Notion experienced technical difficulties this morning and students, project managers and other users – like me – who rely on organizing our calendars have a small freak-out.
The company said in a tweet around 8:30 a.m. ET that it was experiencing a DNA issue, which caused the site to not be resolved for many users. ‘The company did not provide much additional details, but some have speculated that this may be related to Notion’s web address: notion.so. The suffix “so” is the domain of the country Somalia, and a deleted tweet from Notion asked if anyone knows people in Somalia.
We are experiencing a DNS issue, which is causing the site to not resolve for many users. We are actively looking at this issue.
– Concept Status (@NotionStatus) 12 February 2021
The app is primarily used as a workshop for collaboration in the workplace, but it has become popular among informal users – including teens on TikTok, who use it to organize their class schedules. Users complaining that they did not have access to Notion on Friday morning suggested that it might be time for the company, which was valued at $ 2 billion in April 2020, to make offline access a priority in future versions.
The company said around 11:00 ET DNS issue resolved and users should see the service restored. The company has confirmed that it is setting up protections to prevent future issues in an email statement The edge:
The reason for the downtime this morning was a very unusual DNA problem that occurred at registry operator level. Our engineers immediately jumped in and solved the problem – we are now ready again. We are in contact with the registry operator and registrar who set up protocols to prevent this type of incident from recurring in the future. It was a very rare series of events.
So far, my Notion page is still down, so if I’m late for a Zoom meeting today, sorry boss, I tried. I mean, what are we supposed to do, write down our to-do lists like before on paper? (I do that too, tbh. I have organizational issues).