Notion is down

Update: The issue has been fixed. See end of post.

I was trying to save a link to a Notion board, but the desktop app inexplicably kept saying that it couldn’t connect to the Internet. It appears that Notion itself was experiencing DNS issues:

We're experiencing a DNS issue, causing the site to not resolve for many users. We are actively looking into this issue.

— Notion Status (@NotionStatus) February 12, 2021

Panic appeared to have set in at Notion HQ, which was asking users for help getting in touch with Name.com (their domain name registrar).

Jane Manchun Wong hinted that Notion’s .so domain, which is based in Somalia, may have been seized.

Reminder that when you register domains under .io / .so / .me, they actually are originally intended for their own respective geolocations https://t.co/3N5DWK1MrD

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 12, 2021

Update

I think I know what's happened with Notion. They just allowed their domain to expire. Somalia has a 5 day deletion window, and look at the expiry grace period end - it's in exactly 5 days.

cc @wongmjane pic.twitter.com/wQ8uHtAU3b

— Kieran McHugh (@kieranmch) February 12, 2021

Looks like they’ve fixed the issue. The homepage still shows an error (at least for me), but the fact that it’s back up points to the above explanation being correct.

This incident appears to have been a one-off thing. Presumably, no one at Notion saw the email from their domain registrar, which is understandable for a startup growing as fast as it is. Still, it’s a timely reminder that errors come from where you least expect, and also that you should host your status page on a different domain than your main website. (status.notion.so was also down during the outage, rendering it completely useless. 🙄)

Oh well, the excitement is over. Back to work now I guess. ✌️