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:
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…]