POF.com is Down Right Now - March 11, 2015

Right from Twitter we have a report that Plenty of Fish is down:

The twitter report is only 40 minutes old (as of writing this at 6:00pm) but we have people commenting that they couldn't access the dating site since 3:00pm EST. If you visit POF.com using Firefox it shows a connection problem with the message "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.".

If you visit the dating site using Internet Explorer or Google Chrome you will find this nice error screen.

It states "Sorry, we are down for scheduled maintenance". I highly doubt that they are down for maintenance since you only would take a site down at the least busy time of the day which would be probably around 4:00am in the morning.

So something technical obviously happen. We are not sure if it is a software issue or hardware. If you have any more information please comment below (or if you would just like to vent about all the dating you are missing 😉).

Update #1: As of 9:38pm EST we have confirmation that the POF app is not working either.

Update #2: As of 2015-03-12 @12:15am EST All is back to normal. POF.com is now back online. They also posted an update about this on the PlentyOfFish Twitter account.

We're back up and running! Thank you for your patience and understanding. Happy fishing!

There is no mention of this being about maintenance (as the error message suggested) and doing a quick check of the website I see no obvious changes so I have a feeling that this was an unexpected issue that took almost 9 hours to fix. This is a huge amount of time for the site to be down so it was no minor glitch.

From my experience as a Network Administrator in a previous life 1 or more of the following could have disabled POF.com:

• Maintenance - It is maintenance (though a weird time for it)! A major hardware or software component needed to be replace that required not only the website down but the Android and iPhone apps as well.
• Software - It could have been either an operating system problem or for the actual software that makes up POF
• Hardware - Did a server or component fail? Could be but I find it hard to believe that it was since I am sure POF has several redundant systems in place for these type of problems
• Network - Did the internet go down? I doubt it since we were served up that nice "We are down for Maintenance" page.
• Hackers - Doubtful it was a denial of service attack (DOS) since on previous attempts of this we have since POF.com be somewhat accessible by some (slowly) and inaccessible by others. POF could have also been shutdown on purpose. Hackers had found a security hole and PlentyOfFish shut down the site to patch the problem before any damage could happen.

Anyways enough speculating. I am just glad the service is back up and it appears no worse for wear. The last time POF was down for any length of time was funny enough last year on March 27, 2014 for 4 hours. This 9 hour stretch is the longest I have seen POF not offer any service.

For more information about this popular free dating service you can read our review of POF.