proton email unable to sync no connectivity

I don't use Proton as my main email provider, so I wasn't really impacted by the outage. Proton has promised to publish more details about the outage on its blog this week.

The company had to add more servers, and eventually managed to restore the stability and performance of its systems. Proton states that it solved the problem by splitting the load of its database over multiple servers, and slowed down lower priority services like push notifications. So, it activated some protective measures (on July 11th), which in turn caused a roadblock for users who were trying to log in to their Proton accounts, including users who had previously logged in on the web and on their mobile apps. The security system, which Proton had in place, noticed the high activity, and misinterpreted it as a threat. High user activity isn't something that could be simulated, which might explain the tests could not predict the outcome. But, it turns out that the core database, which has higher activity than others, was overloaded after the upgrade.

The software had passed the quality checks without any hiccups, before the main database was upgraded. You can check the logs at for more information. I don't think I've ever seen an email provider experience so many outages in such a short time frame. Interestingly, or worryingly, the issue recurred for a third consecutive day, and I reckoned this could be a major problem. I thought it was trying to connect but failed, but it worked after several seconds.

Though I could still access ProtonMail, I noticed that the site was slower than usual. When I saw new complaints about another outage the next day, I was quite surprised. Some users wrote that they couldn't access Proton VPN and ProtonMail, while some could use the VPN. That's why I didn't write about it here, because I didn't experience the issue first hand. I didn't think the issue was a big deal, as I never noticed any downtime, maybe because I'm in a different time zone than the users who had reported about the outage.

Yesterday, Proton sent out an email to its users to explain the issues behind the disruption of its services. Last week was a tough one for Proton users, the company experienced multiple outages spread across 3 days.

Proton email unable to sync no connectivity