System outage
Currently we are experiencing a partial system outage. We are aware of the problem and actively working to resolve it. We apologize if your service has been affected.
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Official comment
Unfortunately what started out as a server update to improve reliability has not gone as planned. We are working on resolving this as quickly as possible. Our team tested the updates on a staging server prior to implementing the updates, but unfortunately something went wrong when implementing the same solution on our production server and it has now taken down all users.
So sorry about this everyone.
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Now I really hope I have found this page 2.5 hrs ago, so that I don't have to waist my time troubleshoot and write up below email which I just sent out 10 min ago.
"I received a pop up message on my iPhone says the device is offline.I went to garage and see the device is in yellow color.I then checked on your website for possible solution, and it says to reset the device.I did that, and filled in the password for the Wifi, but it still doesn't work.I went one more step ahead, and deleted it from the app, and re-add it in following the instructions. still no luck.double-checked from the router, that ping the IP address of the controller, it is reachable.more troubleshooting - removed the tailwind app from my iPhone, and reinstalled it.When I try to log in the app with my account(my email address), I got "Hmmm...the network connection seems to be down.To isolate the problem from my home network, I disconnect my iPhone's wifi and only use the 4G network, and the same result.Next I did was to click on reset my account password, and it gives me the same msg 'network connection seems to be down'.Now I'm convinced that the issue is your server. it must be down." -
I just used this product for 2 days. I am in Seattle. I can’t login to the app on my iphone now. Very disappointed. The company has our email, an outage notification email should be sent out and provide estimated time for service recovery like power outage. And you told me this is the 4th outage?!
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I recently received a new Tailwind setup for two garage doors. Set everything up yesterday and it was working fine. I went to show it off for my family and it was not working last night and again today. Hopefully it will be back up and running soon. I like that I can close AND open the doors. I had MyQ before but that system can only close, not open.
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One hyphenated word and another word: micro-services architecture. There's a reason commercial cloud service providers (SaaS/PaaS/etc.) are M-SA based...you can roll out changes to containers slowly and only impact a small number of users and immediately roll back if necessary. Spread the services globally. Outages basically become a thing of the past (unless your cloud provider has a major outage). Anyway, retool the back end, throw it in Fargate (or whatever vendor's like-kind service you prefer) and forget about it. Life is SO much easier. I feel for the folks at Tailwind fighting these server based outages. All the focus goes into dragging legacy architecture along as opposed to modernizing. It's the plight of a fast growing small business trying to scale. Anyway, from a customer's perspective, while it sucks to have the service down, I've got traditional openers and some patience for the situation. The service is free, so I am not going to complain (yet). A local API would be really nice, though.
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System is offline in Texas as well. I haven't had any other outages with my smart home products in the time I've had Tailwind go down three times. Getting a little tired of the unreliability, especially when I have it to make my wife/family's lives easier/more convenient. This only adds more consternation and frustration.
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I have no affiliation with the company... just throwing this out there. It's been down twice (maybe three times) since I've had it (April last year). Do I /want/ it to work perfectly every time? Of course. But, without monthly service fees, I expect a problem now and then. I'll certainly update that opinion if it gets more frequent.
It stinks when it's rainy, dark, and you've gotten used to just driving up. But, by my calculations, it's worked about 99% of the time I've had it. Everyone has their tolerance for these things but this is within mine.
--Joe
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The benefits still outweigh the problems given that there's no recurring fee. However, I agree with a few of the comments above: 1) Would really like an e-mail notification when this happens so that I don't spend time troubleshooting my own network first, 2) Would LOVE a locally accessible API to be available as a fallback (for our own coding access and for direct from the app into Tailwind device on the same network)
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Hi Everyone,
Thanks for your patience. We actually do have our server in the cloud. It's on AWS. I selected AWS because I wanted the highest reliability server. Ironically we were doing an upgrade to the server to increase the reliability when something went very wrong. I am personally quite upset because I put additional resources in place to keep this from happening. There are changes being made to our team. This should never happen to this degree.
Also, it appears that a number of people are not receiving the notifications that are being sent through the app. We've sent 3 of them. We wanted to use the notifications because they're immediate, but I hear you - we need to send emails as well.
We are testing local APIs internally already. In the interest of turning something terribly negative into a positive, may I please ask how you would like the local API to work when it comes to shared access? The owner's phone / account would always work, but most people share access either full access or time of day restricted access.
The one thing we struggle with is a situation like the following:
You are the owner. You share access with someone else. Then you revoke that access but that user has taken their phone offline from the internet, and your Tailwind device is offline from the internet. This opens up a security risk because that shared user would still have access to your Tailwind controller and open the door until the Tailwind controller is reconnected to the internet and receives the updated permission status for the shared user.
I'm going to guess that this is an acceptable risk to most users but would like to ask.
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I hear you, Scott. My point was VMs in the cloud still go down (even with redundancy). Moving to a serverless MSA approach brings reliability levels that simply can't be achieved by a "server in the in the cloud" approach (especially when it comes to rolling out upgrades, etc.). Anyway, not relevant for this thread. Appreciate your hard work to get things back to stable working with your current architecture.
As for local API: that level of "how it works" would (in my mind) be left to the whim of the owner. Just expose (with proper auth) the API and let folks create their own tooling around it. If I want to use my RasPi that I use for a dozen other things for integration, sobeit. I wouldn't be looking to you to create the "how it works". Just the interface. Others views may well vary.
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I think it would be beneficial to have more than one level of shared access. One for people who live in the house and will always need access, ie equal access to the owner (partners, children, etc) and then a secondary level for people who you maybe don’t want to have forever access. Then in a downtime situation those users could be treated differently.
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