Not too long ago, the world witnessed one of the most disruptive IT outages this decade – The CrowdStrike incidents on July 19, 2024. This resulted in flights being grounded at airports, offline hospital systems, global TV channels and news broadcasters taken off air due to the incident and nonfunctional banking systems at supermarkets. 

In another large IT outage, a first this year, Proton Mail, a ‘free and secure email service’ was subjected to server outages last evening [january 9, 2025]. 

Proton Mail, a firm notoriously known for helping the Spanish Police locate a French activist by giving away their IP address, has now suffered a huge outage with most of its applications going out of service. 

Read: Global IT Outage Caused by CrowdStrike Update Glitch

Proton Outage Disrupting Major Services

The outage particularly affected Proton Mail and Calendar. 

At 3:10 pm GMT on Thursday, Proton Mail announced on its platform that it was currently experiencing intermittent network issues affecting some of its users. 

“We are working to fully restore services as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience,” the notification on the website read. 

The outage lasted for a couple of hours with issues being completely resolved by 8:49 pm GMT. 

“Earlier today at around 4 pm Zurich, the number of new connections to Proton's database servers increased sharply globally across Proton's infrastructure,” stated the company’s notification.

Proton service disruptions impacted users’ access to their accounts on most of the company’s major services including ProtonVPN, Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Wallet.

The outage was primarily attributed to intermittent networking issues.

“We are currently experiencing intermittent network issues affecting some of our users,” reported Proton. 

Outage Attributed to Infrastructure Challenges 

In the latest reports, the company said that the outage was a result of a sudden surge in database connections likely overloading the system. 

This was further fuelled by the ongoing infrastructure migration. Proton was migrating to a Kubernetes-based system introduced limitations in scaling capacity to handle the increased load.

Due to the migration, the system was running on two parallel infrastructures. They lacked the capability to easily move load between two different infrastructures. 

Proton Mail was mainly caught in the issue because of the migration process, 

“Because of this, we were not able to automatically scale capacity to handle the massive increase in load,” stated Proton.

The website’s engineering team in a corresponding investigation spotted a software change that may have contributed to the initial load spike. 

Proton says that after this change was rolled back, the database load returned to normal. 

“The completion of ongoing infrastructure migrations will make Proton's infrastructure more resilient to unexpected incidents like this by restoring the higher level of redundancy that we typically run, and we are working to complete this work as quickly as possible,” the firm stated. 

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