Server issues at Prezi leave frustrated users without work for 2 hours

Cloud based presentation service Prezi was hit by server issues which left many users without presentations for two hours.

The company, which recently reached 5 million users, kept communication around the issue constant, through regular updates on Twitter and Facebook, but the issue may impact users’ view of the service’s reliability.

Prezi claimed that it managed to bring half of the presentations on its server back to life within half an hour of the problems beginning. Given its reach and strong fanbase, that still left many people inconvenienced, with a number of anxious users voicing concern that presentations due within the day, hours or less were blank or not available.

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Outages are never welcomed  by users, particularly when they are used for important work-related tasks such as company presentations. While those using the free service have less cause to complain, subscribers (that pay upwards of $59 per year) have legitimate cause for concern as Prezi-rival PowerPoint (love it or hate it) is immune to sever and web-hosting issues [although Prezi does offer an offline version which remained unaffected].

Despite Prezi’s excellent ongoing communication, outages like this can create reliability issues for users. If it is to grow amongst professionals, Prezi will need to ensure it is more robust in the future.

Fortunately for the company issues from this outage is likely to be limited to users in Asia Pacific as it occurred outside of business hours in Europe and the US.

We contacted Prezi for comment and will keep you posted with what it has to say.

Update: Peter Arvai, Prezi CEO, got in touch with a comment to clarify.

Hi Jon,

Sorry, but I haven’t gotten an email from you yet. I was working on a Prezi myself and I alerted our org immediately. While most web based services I know of have issues from time to time with their servers, there is never a good excuse. I am truly sorry for the inconvenience we caused to our users today.

Our Desktop (offline) version of Prezi is available for Pro users and this is the only alternative to ensure 100% server independence.

Best

Prezi CEO

[Image courtesy of Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com]