It’s now almost three weeks that nearly all Digital Dream Labs servers are offline. We remember: DDL representatives claimed that this was a “scheduled maintenance”.
Let’s all have a hearty laugh at that nonsense. A “scheduled maintenance” ist announced in advance, unless you are extremely incompetent (well …). And in addition a “scheduled maintenance” should never take this long. And if it actually takes this long (with may be happen with a major FUBAR) you would be advised to inform your paying customers regularily about problem details and give constant updates instead of trying to keep up the obvious, blatant “Scheduled maintenance” lie. Unless you are not able to provide this information …
Still at DDL they have the audacity to test customer gullibility with a new update:
We apologize for any continued inconvenience caused as our server maintenance is still ongoing, but we’re working diligently to complete it within the week and are hopeful to have it restored in that time or before. We appreciate your understanding during this time and would also like to remind you not to perform resets or recoveries on Vector until after this is completed. Thank you for your continued support as we work to restore Vector Voice services for all. Stay tuned for further updates!
Seriously? If it were one service, maybe. But actually almost everything Vector-related is down, including seemingly unrelated services the Python SDK forums and documentation. An outage of this magnitude is highly alarming, even more alarming is that no one at DDL is able to repair it in a reasonable timeframe, not even one at a time. Simple servers should have come back up a long time ago. Maybe it is not even e tech problem, but a financial one?
Also one has to notice that the wording of the update is the usual DDL bullshittery with senseless PR fillword-phrases like “diligently” or “we appreciate your understanding” and lacks real information.
I am very curious to see if any servers actually come back up “within the week” and if this will include all servers, or only voice services. Let’s hope that the others, like Python SDK forums or the OTA archive, are not lost forever.
Everyone should consider to give DDL the finger and connect their Vectors to Wire-Pod or one of it’s variants to get rid of Digital Dream Labs once and forever.
yea I agree its a money problem
It’s not just the robot servers either. The forums on forums.anki.com are also down at this time, which means a huge plethora of knowledge and community learning on the robot has been closed. This is absolutely terrible as the community, not DDL, is what kept Cozmo going since its inception.
Yes, I wrote about that in the blog post … And, yes, it’s horrible!
I fear they may be lost forever.
Seriously FFing bullshit. The least they could do is give everyone a heads up so that we, as DEVELOPERS, could migrate our years of research and development off their shitty platform and onto something more stable. I was in the middle of a research project on my cozmo robot and now that the forums are gone, that’s just a whole knowledgebase of information I have to restart.
Utterly ridiculous, pardon my language.
Fortunately, I switched to wire-pod some time ago. But it is really a pity about the SDK forum 🙁
thats what I am trying to do switch to wire-pod but may be too late as can’t sign in to DDL to update vector , hes a very unhappy robot ….
I see it as a scam, I don’t know if they can be sued because they were sold for quite an expensive price.
Of course they can be sued if they take money for something and then not actually provide it.