In a time long before Instagram and other Web phenomena, when push support for notifications was not widely enjoyed by iPhone apps, Boxcar was a truly trail-blazing application. Years later however, things have moved on significantly and an outage to the service that was once the pillar of connected smartphones hasn’t raised too many indignant shouts on the Web…with some users suggesting the service may be finished.
It isn’t exactly clear how long Boxcar has been down for but, for at least the last six hours, the following error notification has greeted users of its iOS app:
Furthermore, the Boxcar website is down — which is never a good sign — although the blog is just about still loading:
Here are some of the complaints we’ve spotted on Twitter, a great deal of which are in Japanese, let it be noted:
@boxcar hey, any known server issues? Haven’t been getting any pushes for the past 6 hours and connection “Uh oh” errors in the app too.
— Jannis Gundermann (@jannisg) July 11, 2012
@boxcar here we go yet againu decide u wanna stop working tonight mr boxcar
— Chaiken Vine (@chaikenfqhtn9) July 11, 2012
Looks like @boxcar is down again. :/
— Gary Ng (@gary_ng) July 11, 2012
The issues have been going for longer than a day, according to some users:
is @boxcar dead? down for a couple of days.
— Stephen Birarda (@stephenbirarda) July 11, 2012
@ElisaRockDoc Boxcar hasn’t seemed to work on my iPhone in months. :(
— randallwong (@randallw) July 11, 2012
Hmm. @boxcar shut down?
— Liew Cheon-Fong (@liewcf) July 11, 2012
Boxcar’s Twitter feed (@boxcar) has been quiet since June, indicating that the firm hasn’t publicly acknowledged any issues with its service of late.
We’ve reached out to the company for further details but the auto-notification we received back suggests that we’re unlikely to hear anything further until US office hours. So, for now, things continue to remain unclear.
Certainly, there was a time when a Boxcar outage had the potential to cause mayhem, today it is just surrounded in uncertainty.
Feature image via Flickr / Nerdegutt, iPhone screenshot via @faircher
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