Eventbrite is Dark

By  |  Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 10:42 am

Event-planning site Eventbrite is one of the gems of the Web 2.0 world: It’s what Evite would be if it was a whole lot better and had evolved a whole lot more over the years. That’s why it’s become the de facto standard for coordinating everything from tweetups to conferences to plain ol’ parties here in Silicon Valley. Every time I use it, either to plan an event or attend one, I’m impressed.

Except for this morning, when I headed there to RSVP for an event and found that the site wasn’t responding at all. A bit later, it put up this message:

Eventbrite is down

Judging from Twitter, there are lots of frustrated folks trying to use Eventbrite for lots of events this morning.

I tend to be sympathetic to the challenges of sites that suffer technical hiccups (Technologizer had some self-inflicted ones of its own on Sunday–my apologies if you showed up and couldn’t get in). But as with Gmail’s outage last week, Eventbrite’s troubles this morning are a sobering reminder that there’s no such thing as 100% uptime, and even really good Web services can break. And the more popular a site is, the bigger a deal even short outages can be. Despite competition such as Upcoming, Eventbrite is so pervasive around here that even a brief disruption feels like a rip in the social fabric of the Valley.

I’m hoping the downtime proves to be brief, and that Eventbrite does a good job of explaining what happened and ensuring it won’t happen again. I really like this service–and there’s this party tomorrow night that I really want to RSVP for…

[Last minute update: The moment I pressed Publish on this post, Eventbrite came back. Keep your fingers crossed…]

 
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  1. Ray's take on the online promotion platform Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 7:56 am

    Nice post. Eventbrite seems like a decent ticket-only site. A similar company who are growing rapidly in the UK in particular is Fatsoma.com. Their platform is slightly different though as promoters create their own websites using the promotion platform’s sitebuilder then sell tickets through here. There is also the opportunity to co-promote or network with artists and venues, such as in the case of festivals. I also read recently that they have invested in extra servers to ensure a faster process due to the devastating effect a blackout can have. In any case, it seems that this type of platform is the future, bringing power back to the promoters and artists and away from resellers and ticketers.

  2. Payton Butler Says:
    July 9th, 2010 at 12:26 pm

    Online promotion is heavily done by internet marketers out there promoting goods and services..:;