Goodreads shut down for many users during an hour-long outage on Monday and Tuesday
Washington — An hour-long outage at the book-focused website on Monday and Tuesday caused Goodreads to shut down for many users.
The Amazon-owned site, which allows users to keep track of the books they read and post reviews, was down for users throughout the day on Monday, according to outage tracker DownDetector. It appears that outage reports began around 4 p.m. ET and continued late into the night, peaking at over 1,800 shortly before 10 p.m. ET.
While some users said they were able to access Goodreads again as early as Tuesday, others reported spotty connections. According to Downdetector, several hundred outage reports resurfaced on Tuesday morning.
“Goodreads is down for maintenance. We hope to be back in a few minutes. Please try again soon!” a message on the site read Tuesday morning.
What motivated the maintenance of the site is unclear. Goodreads did not immediately respond to a request for statement from The Associated Press on Tuesday morning.
The outage affected both the Goodreads website and the app, according to reports from Downdetector and posts on social media. In addition to maintenance notices, others said they received error messages about Goodreads’ servers being over capacity.
Goodreads responded to a handful of frustrated users on Twitter late Monday night and early Tuesday, saying the site was “working to fix the problem as soon as possible.”
According to Time, Goodreads, which calls itself “the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations,” has more than 120 million users worldwide.
In recent years, the website has faced strong criticism over content moderation and the dangers of “review bombing”. For example, on Monday, The New York Times published a story detailing how Goodreads reviews can derail a book’s success before it’s even published.
