Technical Issues

We just got word and have confirmed that Plenty of Fish is currently down at the moment. It looks like it has been offline for at least the last hour (6:30pm EST). If you visit the dating site now you will receive one of the following server error messages:

• Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)
• Server is too busy

It looks like the server is accessible (hence the available error message) but the web service (IIS) is down.

We will update this post when we get more information.

Update #1: As of around 12:00am EST (May31) we have had reports that POF is back up. Though it still appears to be down for us.

Update #2: As of 7:00am Plenty of Fish is back up again. Not sure what happened but everything seems working normally. According to our estimates POF was down for approximately 10 to 12 hours.

For more details on this free dating site, check out our review of Plenty of Fish.

I was notified by a user and have just confirmed that the dating site Plenty of Fish is down. I tried accessing the website from a number of countries (using proxy servers) and received a connection timeout error in all cases for both Plenty of Fish domains (www.plentyoffish.com and www.pof.com). It looks like the website has been down for at least an hour now (8:30 am EST).

A connection timeout error with a website usually indicates a problem with accessing the web server (it took too long to respond). This means something probably happened to the internet connection or with the web servers hardware. The last time POF was down for a while was June of 2009. This was due to a power failure (see Story) and resulted in about 8 hours of downtime.

On a related note the owner of Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind just got married last weekend. This may mean he is on his honeymoon and not close to home which could result in Plenty Of Fish taking a little while longer to get up and running again. I expect Plenty Of Fish to be online again sometime late morning or early afternoon.

We will update this post when we get more news. If you have any news please comment on this story.

Update #1: That didn't take too long. PlentyofFish.com is now back online as of roughly 9:58 am eastern standard time.

It looks like our friends over at the Unofficial eHarmony Blog have had their DNS hacked. If you visit their website now, you will be redirected to a site called mybookface (which obviously plays off of Facebook). Unfortunately popular blogs are constantly targeted by hackers. I hope they get their site backup soon as it is a great resource for eHarmony members.

If you are reading this post and would like more information on the dating service eHarmony, check out our in depth review.

Update #1: As of August 7 the site is still down. Hopefully someone from the Unofficial eHarmony Blog can comment on this story and give us an update when things should get back to normal.

Update #2: As of August 8 the blog is back online, sort of. They seem to be having some display and template issues.

On Tuesday we reported that Plenty Of Fish was down for over 10 hours. Today we found out why. Late Monday a power outage made POF go offline. With the website already down, it was decided that it was a good time to upgrade the core database server (both hardware and software) which hadn't been touched since 2005. Users of the dating site should see significant increase in speed of the site loading, especially during peak times.

We also found out that there is an upgraded scheduled for image serving. Nearly 10,000 images on average are served per second on POF and they currently have over 200 million images stored. Will we see additional downtime next week while this upgrade is performed? Markus didn't mention any but we may see one if moving image servers doesn't go off without a hitch.

A received a number of visitors emails late yesterday informing me that PlentyOfFish.com was down. POF was offline for at least 8 hours on June 9, 2009 (thanks Glennis) and currently 3 hour this morning (June 10, 2009).

From what I could tell at 12:30am EST was the POF web server is up but not serving web pages. So it doesn't seem to be a network problem. I am just making an educated guessing here but, It could be a software glitch, a hardware issue (bad hard drive?) or maybe the dating site got hacked? When I get any new information I will post it here.

The last major downtime for Plenty Of Fish was back in late February (see Story).

Update #1: As of 8:30am EST, Plenty of Fish is online and working without any problems. The exact time it went back online is unknown.

Update #2: POF was down due to a power outage and a upgrade to the core database server (see Story).

For more information on this dating site, read our Plenty Of Fish review.

According to a few reports, the dating site OKCupid.com went down late last night (May 28, 2009) for a couple of hours as apparently a cup of coffee was accidentally spilled on a router. When we tried accessing the dating site ourselves earliy this morning we received the following message:

So...We thought it would be cool to get a cat for the office, but we needed a litter box, and there wasn't really room in the bathroom, so we put it next to these servers in the back, and everything would have been fine, but the A/C repair guy was allergic and the cat reacts badly to loud noises and there were all these wires hanging back there and a bunch of surprisingly flammable packing material...

Erik thought it would be JUST AWESOME to put a paperclip on the end of a rubber band and shoot it at Vinay's eye, and it would have just been Erik and Vinay's problem except Vinay had a cup of coffee and was standing over James, who was fixing our router at the time...

Anyway, we'll have things back up soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. - Worker

Here's hope it is backup soon.

Update - May 29, 2009, 9:15 am - I just tried OK Cupid again and everything seems to be back to normal. Happy Testing!