Preventing outages on Tablo when Tablo servers are down

Their statements are ambiguous, unlike yours, which I respect, but disagree with.

“We know exactly what happened. We’re just not sure why it’s up at the moment.”?

That’s the second-nicest thing I’ve heard all day. :slight_smile:

I created an account to agree with the OP.

I can understand that looping in Tablo’s servers is a good way to make Tablo full featured yet easy to use. I do not understand why advanced users can’t just point their browsers to a Tablo’s local IP address and use it entirely independent of outside network services, even if with fewer convenient/pretty functions.

Yesterday changed my opinion of Tablo from “easy recommendation to make” to “can’t recommend,” but clarification and perhaps some small changes could switch that back again.

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A reply to my support ticket came back from Tablo:

Feb 12, 1:25 PM EST

Hi there,

The Tablo servers experienced a brief outage yesterday and this morning. This could have caused some connectivity issues with http://my.tablotv.com/, some Tablo applications, and the subscription potal at https://account.tablotv.com/.

Everything is up and running now. If you try to reconnect, you shouldn’t have any further issues. If you run into any problems, reboot your Tablo and try once more - or reply to this email and we’ll take a look.

I came to TabloTV via the SimpleTV route, so my eyes are wide open. The TabloDVR hardware has no long term value without Nuvyyo service and support.

My +1 comment: building resiliency into the my.tablotv.com web application similar to the Roku and FireTV apps makes sense. In this outage, the Internet to my.tablotv.com was solid, but no LAN based fall back was provided, like we have for “connect via WiFi” when the TabloDVR is not found on the LAN.

not sure if it will help, or if I’ll get it finished, but this may be useful for folks who need some more standalone independence from the cloud components of the device. It’s a tricky balance because the native web app needs to call home so you can connect remotely. I very much doubt there will be a big repeat of the front end issues from yesterday but it will be nice to have a standalone client if I can get my act together…

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Thank you everyone for your patience over the last few days.

Between the afternoon of February 11th and the morning of February 12th, Tablo’s servers experienced a series of outages due to a bug between two processes. This bug has been fixed and we apologize for any inconvenience it caused.

We take outages very seriously. We are currently reviewing our infrastructure design to ensure server capacity continues to scale with customer demand, and plan on implementing additional monitoring and alerting processes.

It should be noted that our servers have enjoyed a 99.87% uptime over the past year, including planned maintenance outages.


HOW SERVER OUTAGES AFFECT YOUR TABLO DVR
Server outages only impact out-of-home streaming via Tablo Connect and the ability of some Tablo apps to connect to your Tablo OTA DVR. Scheduled recordings and recordings in progress are not affected.

All Tablo apps – except apps for web browsers (my.tablotv.com), Smart TVs, and Xbox One - are designed with a fallback mechanism to connect to the Tablo locally if the internet connection is interrupted.

Apps with this fallback mechanism will continue to provide access to live and recorded TV via your Tablo regardless of server status.


Thank you,

Grant Hall
CEO, Nuvyyo Inc.

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Thanks for the explanation, I’ve been on that side of situations like this and in my opinion the priorities are always identify and fix the problem first, then follow up with explanation when you have all the data. Kudos for your approach and following up.

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:slight_smile: Yes, from a pro-datacenter protectionist position. However, from a pro-consumer position, you want to hear:

“We are currently experiencing technical difficulties that are affecting the ability to use our application via web browser, and possibly other services. We will try to keep you informed as we discover more about the problem. We do not as yet, have an estimated time for being back in service. As such we will make additional posts every 15 minutes until we have an adequate solution or workaround in place. Thank you for you patience on this matter.”

Something like that would have been nice (vs crickets).

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Valid points. Guess it depends on whether resources are available to do both at the same time.

Thank you.

Mr. Hall,

All Tablo apps – except apps for web browsers (my.tablotv.com), Smart TVs, and Xbox One - are designed with a fallback mechanism to connect to the Tablo locally if the internet connection is interrupted.

This is unacceptable. I was under the impression that I had cut the cord and was not aware that an internet connection to your servers is required so that my TV could connect to my Tablo DVR.

Can you please re-design all devices to have a fallback mechanism.

Thank you.

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Have the Tablo servers been down again??
I’ve been attempting to watch some recordings on my Tablo since ~4:30am this morning.
I’ve tried using my web browser (Chrome) on 2 different PC’s, tried my Roku and tried the Tablo app on my Android tablet.
I tried rebooting my Tablo to no avail.
The only useful info I’ve received is on the browser. I keep getting the message “Cannot connect to Tablo servers”.

My Tablo is online. On my browser if I enter the Tablo IP, I get the message “Nuvyyo Tablo Server”. If I enter the Tablo IP:8885/guide/channels, I can see info from the Tablo. I’ve even sent UDP packets to the Tablo and get the correct response.
My Tablo is online.

Now it’s just after 6:00am and everything is working again. Go figure.

This is such a frustrating problem. I should not be required to connect to the Tablo servers just to watch recordings already on my Tablo. The only reason I should require an internet connection is to update the TV Guide, to get firmware updates and to access my Tablo remotely. Otherwise an internet connection should not be required.

The Tablo DVR is such a great product for cord-cutters. It’s ashamed that loss of Tablo Servers causes this product to be rendered useless.

@TabloTV @TabloSupport Please fix this issue.

Dead for me too :frowning:
Edit : Well, it was down - Now it’s up :slight_smile:

Well, I had the same problem this morning on my laptop and desktop, but my iPhone app was fine. However, after a while, when I changed channels on the phone, there was suddenly no longer any sound although the video was still working. It’s still not working. Any chance this is related to the server problem? My laptop and desktop are working fine now, but not the iPhone. Thanks.

Hello all,

Our apologies for the confusion. There was a series of outages between 3:00 AM - 6:00 AM last night that we are currently investigating.

It’s peculiar that some of you weren’t able to access your Tablos from apps that should be able to connect locally (E.g the Roku, smartphones, etc).

This should not be the case, and will be part of our investigation moving forward. We’ll update this as we get more details.

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and starting the “update” timer … now. :slight_smile:

Hi all,

We’ve completed our investigation into the outage that occurred earlier this week.

If you’ve been following this thread, you’ll know that we’ve been working to add new monitoring solutions and create as much system redundancy as possible since our last outage.

Early on Tuesday morning, we were adjusting some monitoring solutions in our server stack when one of the Tablo servers went down. This caused some requests to the Tablo server to fail - which is why some of you had difficulty connecting to some apps.

The new monitoring tools and improved fallback logic we now have in place should prevent an outage of this nature from occurring again.

We’re also working to make Tablo more easily discoverable in the event of an outage. The latest Roku channel update (2.4.4) employs a new fallback discovery method that will be more reliable should your Tablo not be able to reach our servers.

We’ll be watching how this new logic works closely, and we’ll hopefully bring it to as many of the other Tablo apps as possible.

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Yay~ Thanks for the update.