Online organization app Notion had technical issues this morning, and students, project managers, and other users – like me – who rely on it to organize our calendars have little freak outs.
The company said in a tweet at around 8:30 a.m. ET that it “experienced a DNS issue, which prevented the site from resolving for many users.” The company didn’t provide much additional detail, but some speculated it could be related to Notion’s web address: notion.so. The suffix “zo” is the domain for the country of Somalia, and a deleted tweet from Notion asked if anyone knew people in Somalia.
We are experiencing a DNS issue which prevents the site from being resolved for many users. We are actively investigating this issue.
– Notion Status (@NotionStatus) February 12, 2021
The app is primarily used as a workplace collaboration tool, but has gained popularity among casual users – including teens on TikTok, who use it to organize their class schedules. Users complaining about not being able to access Notion on Friday morning suggested that now may be the time for the company, valued at $ 2 billion in April 2020, to make offline access a priority in future releases.
At around 11 a.m. ET, the company said the DNS problem has been resolved and users should see the service restored. The company confirmed it was taking steps to prevent future problems in an emailed statement to The edge
The reason for the downtime this morning was a very uncommon DNS problem occurring at the registry operator level. Our engineers immediately jumped in and fixed the problem – we are now done again. We are in contact with the registry administrator and the registrar who have established protocols so that we can prevent these types of incidents from recurring in the future. This was a very rare series of events.
So far my Notion page is still blank so if I’m late for a Zoom meeting today sorry boss I gave it a shot. I mean, what should we do, write our to-do lists on paper like we used to? (I do that too, tbh. I have organizational problems).