Vivaldi’s sync outage stretches into a fifth day

Vivaldi is on its fifth day of trying to navigate an issue that has taken down its online sync services, preventing information from being shared between machines.

The problem surfaced on Dec. 6, but the company hasn’t been able to resolve it. Vivaldi’s status page reports that the service has been unavailable for four straight days, though other online services — including the Vivaldi.com website, login functions, and auto updating — remain unaffected.

Vivaldi’s sync services work much like how users log into Windows, Microsoft Edge or Chrome. In this case, information (what sites you’ve browsed, what feeds or email you’ve read) are sent to the cloud and to other Vivaldi browsers signed in on other PCs or your phone. Without the sync support, the browser doesn’t know where you left off on another PC or what you’ve interacted with.

Vivaldi originally blamed a database performance issue, which prevented a third of its sync accounts from being served. The database was unable to keep up with traffic.

The most recent update again describes a mismatch between its server capabilities and the amount of data users are sending its way.

“We are sorry for the slow updates, we have had our hands full trying to get our database backend for sync into shape again,” Vivaldi’s engineers wrote. “It’s been a slow process and we are still working on adding more resources to the current setup. We have had plans to add even more resources to our backend, but the growth in synced data stored by our users has been exceeding our plans.

“We are adding more resources to our current setup, but the process to balance that out before we try to start our sync services up again is taking some time,” Vivaldi added. “The data transfer to the new database resources is still in progress and we need to perform further tests before bringing the overloaded parts of our db [database] back into production. We are really sorry for the downtime as we put pride in keeping everything running smoothly at all times.”

Vivaldi is my “alternative” browser, which I especially like for its little utilities like RSS feeds and mail, as well as its new, updated Vivaldi 7 UI. My colleague Michael Crider has also been lured over as well, after giving up on Google Chrome.

Unfortunately, the database bug bit me personally, as I was trying to port my data from one Vivaldi implementation to another machine. I suppose I’ll just have to wait a bit longer like everyone else.