Upwork is probably the leading international freelancing platform. Although it is often regarded as a source of cheap labor and low-quality projects, it is still de-facto the biggest and most influential resource (please correct me if I am wrong). And it fails every week or so.
Well, I haven’t picked up any new jobs there for quite a while (I’m happy with my current workload), but I still dust off my profile page from time to time, polish it a little and keep it generally maintained.
And like anyone else who’d been around for a while I noticed the frequent outages and Cloudflare error messages. Sometimes I felt that all of this happened maybe a little too often.
Today the site went down once again. This time I decided to take a look at the Upwork status page, which also has a “History” tab. Amazingly, there rarely was a week without an outage! You may take a look yourself, here’s a small sample of 2017 disruptions (I omitted the planned site maintenance events):
| Date | Incident status |
|---|---|
| Mar 20 | Areas of Upwork are temporarily unavailable |
| Mar 18 | Degraded Performance |
| Mar 17 | Service Disruption |
| Mar 16 | Degraded Performance |
| Mar 15 | Service Disruption |
| Mar 15 | Degraded Performance |
| Mar 7 | Areas of Upwork are temporarily unavailable |
| Mar 1 | Partial Service Disruption |
| Feb 28 | Partial Service Disruption |
| Feb 28 | Degraded Performance |
| Feb 22 | Service Disruption |
| Feb 14 | Partial Service Disruption |
| Feb 9 | Service Disruption (ok, ok, impacted by AWS outage) |
| Feb 8 | Partial Service Disruption |
| Feb 7 | Areas of Upwork are temporarily unavailable |
| Feb 2 | Partial Service Disruption |
I got bored at this point, but trust me, it is not the bottom of the page. Not even one tenth.
Now, when you factor in the generally slow service, the inept customer support, and the recently increased fees, you might wonder if (and how) the whole thing can stay afloat in the near future.