How We're Making Glitch More Reliable

Hi friends,

We want to acknowledge the past several weeks of service issues. Many of you have reached out thoughtfully and offered support. Thank you for that. You’re the reason why we have a reputation for being one of the friendliest communities of coders on the web!

Here’s what’s going on: we’re continuing to grow at a really rapid pace, and also seeing new kinds of high-volume automated requests hitting the service. Handling both of those at the same time is straining the platform. In addition to all the increasingly-popular apps that community makers are creating, we’re also seeing an influx of attacks on our service and some projects running malicious code. These make the task at hand even more challenging. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be making significant changes that will have a big impact on uptime and stability. On top of that, we’re working on improving your experience with managing projects on Glitch.

To be clear: Until we get through these changes, you can expect there to be some instability from time to time. We’re sorry for the inconsistent experience, and are working as quickly as we can to fix this in a way that will last. In the meantime, here’s what you can do if you are experiencing instability:

• Keep an eye on status.glitch.com for updates. We’re making sure those updates are more timely and descriptive.

• Send a message to [email protected] if you find your projects still aren’t loading once an incident is resolved.

• Avoid making changes to a project if you start to see reconnecting errors. Changes to your code are only reliably stored when that connection is working

• For incidents going forward, we may temporarily block pinging services as an alternative to blocking traffic and shutting down projects, as we have done in the past. This will lower the impact on the community as a whole, but anyone still using pinging services will likely receive more notifications that their apps are down. We’re also asking for your help! Here’s how:

• One of our big challenges is dealing with third-party services that ping Glitch to keep apps awake. Not all of these services are as reliable as we’d like, and sometimes when there are problems they can cause as much load on our systems as a malicious attack would. We’re not banning the use of pinging (or “uptime”) services on Glitch right now, and we’d like to not have to. So, if you use these services, disable or turn off any pinging services you don’t need or that aren’t absolutely necessary. (You definitely don’t need to ping more than once every 5 minutes or so — more than that just adds load to the system but doesn't make any difference for your app.)

• Boost your apps! Glitch members have the ability to boost up to 5 projects, which prevents those apps from going to sleep. It’s much easier to set up and manage than remote pinging services, and they won’t fall asleep when we temporarily block those services during incidents. Oh, and you’ll also get extra disk space, extra memory, and no rate limits! You can sign up right here if you want to become a member.  We’ll continue to post about our progress here. Thanks again for your support and patience!

✌️ Jenn + Tasha