COVID-19 not blamed for tech outage: We were just being a bit crap, says TeamViewer

Having lifted connection checking on its freebie remote-access product, TeamViewer celebrated with a good, old-fashioned falling over.

At least for "a subset of users".

Quite a vocal subset, if social media is anything to go by. As one wag commented: "Subset planet Earth..."

The issues began this morning and by 10am UK time, the company admitted that new connections for this mysterious "subset" were indeed borked. A fix was rolled out just over an hour later and by 12:18pm UK time, the gang said things were back up and running.

The morning's antics were, as a Register reader observed, "fun times in remote support land".

The timing is most unfortunate, coming as the company prepared to unshackle its personal tier from commercial checking. However, in what will be a breath of fresh air, the company has opted not to point the finger at the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Instead it appears to be a straightforward technical borkage.

A spokesperson told El Reg: "This morning, a subset of our users have experienced a connectivity issue when accessing our services.

"The root-cause of the outage were side-effects due to a release in our infrastructure and had nothing to do with the currently increased traffic due to the [novel] corona[virus] crisis."

So there you go. As barely an hour seems to pass nowadays without COVID-19 being blamed for one failure or another, TeamViewer's borkage was down to a duff release. Just like the good old days, if not quite so comforting to customers.

Especially those who searched for TeamViewer on Twitter and found... something else. Always go for @TeamViewer, gang, otherwise Here Be Dragons.

The spokesperson went to boast: "In general, we have an uptime of 99.9 per cent of our infrastructure and services and it is our highest priority to provide our customers and users with an excellent performance of our software.

"In very rare cases, something goes wrong. In these cases it is very important that we detect the root-cause very quickly and solve the issue – as it has been this morning.

"We apologize for any inconvenience." ®