UPDATE: 11:54 PM PST
The maintenance page is being placed back up on Zinio temporarily while we make some final adjustments. Thank you for your patience.
Original Post:
Earlier today Zinio services were restored for a short period of time. During that time
we uncovered one additional element that needed to be addressed. We have put the website back into “maintenance mode” for a few more hours while we verify that we have corrected this outstanding item.
Thank you for your patience. When Zinio does come back online you can look forward to these items:
“Back online” means you will be able to:
· Browse Zinio.com
· Download new content to iPad, iPhone, PC and Android apps
· Shop across website and device stores
· Sign in to your Library, on zinio.com and all logged out apps
· Enjoy our Online Reader in browser and Preview feature
· View and have access to our customer service contact page
You can be assured that all of your purchased content and downloaded library items will be waiting for you when you log in. You will not need to update any services at all.
Please keep talking to us through email, Facebook and Twitter. We are enjoying the positive comments, constructive feedback and recommendations for the future.
Thanks again, we are almost there.
ziniophile 
Thanks for the updates. Glad to see ye are getting back
Thanks Colin
Ignore the haters. Cant wait for the site to be up!
There are no “haters”, just frustrated clients. Good PR ( regular updates and firm uptime schedule ) would have made this much easier for most folks. It would have been better if we would have been told ” system will be down until March 6th @ 12:00pm because of ______ failure.
Clients would then know they won’t be getting thier subscriptions until after that time.
Keep is simple, but truthful. Crap happens. Hopefully the Zinio techs will get some needed rest soon.
Congrats… some constructive feedback for the future based on some of the comments I’ve seen:
1) find a way to default your ‘maintenance screen’ directly to the blog page or include a link to it at least… would have cleared up a lot of issues.
2) consider an ‘offsite’ mail list to complement your existing system so you can notify customers directly by email when the system is down.
3) seems like a lot of people are responding with negative feedback to the outage – not sure if it’s possible, but any way to fast track new version of the software/features would go a long way to allowing positive reviews to start coming in again, and would do a lot to restore ‘goodwill’.
Good luck in the recovery of the systems, and in the recovery of customer relations – the latter may be the harder part with some people. I hope both go very well so you can begin focussing on moving forward.
I like the idea of it defaulting to this blog, or at least having a link to it.
Site is working !
Best wishes!!!
Was up for a few downloads…appears to be down again
sigh… I thought I could re-download the magazines again after wake up, but it’s still not back up yet. I couldn’t even see the “maintanence page”!
need fix the logn in get there is bug it
can you please email the details of what you are seeing to site-support@zinio.com?
Send it and Hope they fix it usename
Basic Data Center best practices would have avoided this. There are many cluster and replication tools on the market that can ensure failover/fallback in a swift manner. You should be large enough at this stage to have that capability and knowledge in your IT team.
had issues and followed help advice in app. removed app as advised. reinstalled app and now have nothing!! please advise when I can get my mags back….not impressed…and no, my iTunes backup is not available as on holiday, with no mags!!
I must say, very disappointing.
Unfortunately I found this page only after deleting and reinstalling the ipad app.
So now I have no access to any of the content I already paid for.
Also have to download it all again on the Ipad after, if ever, it works again.
I wonder why you guys have first no back up in place for such issues and second no one seems to have been notified by mail.
Also, not sure what timezone you refer to here: “We are working to return our services to 100% by the morning of Saturday, March 5, 2011, or earlier.”, here in Tokyo it`s now Sunday, March 6, 2011, 2pm and nothing is working!
All in all, a terrible screw up on your system side and an even worse one for your customer relations. You guys need some competition to keep you on your toes!
Thomas
Hi. Others from Tokyo seem to be fine now. Please email me at jmullen@zinio.com if not.
you must be joking?
apologies…the ipad app works again, even though the webpage is still on maintenance
99% ready to go live is still 0% live. I sure hope you guys plan to rebuild some goodwill through compensation because this isn’t going to be forgotten anytime soon. I’ve recommended Zinio to many of my tech co-workers but am not likely to any longer.
Well it’s also March 6 here in the east in the US where we were told things would would be back online by morning. So much for being on schedule.
I think the majority of customers understand things happen but the way it was handled is what they don’t understand. Hours after the suggestion was made that on the website it should show a link to the blog. nothing has changed. I bet the majority of people here could do that for you if you don’t know how. Also for some time it redirected me to a different site which was ignored in my messages to you. Convince me now you weren’t hacked!
It would also be one thing if this was the first problem but I bet I am far from the first person that has had problems with the service before.I like being able to read magazines online but not days after they are out in the stores.
I think far more or your customers would have found it excusable had you actually shown some concern. Have patience, we’re working on it and we’re on schedule got old a very long time ago. Communication is key and that was a major fail.
Are you really a mom and pop operation? In this day and age, a four day outage on a website is unacceptable. I sure hope you don’t get negative fallout but it appears that it is wishful thinking. I will not be recommending you to anyone although it would be very difficult not to convey negative messages about my experience.
I suppose you will (maybe, perchance) be back up in a month after your techs come back from training.
Well in Australia it is now Sunday 6th March @ 1824 and the site was up for all of 20 mins or so. Since this site went down 4 days ago, NOT ONE SINGLE WORD from the site owners to explain this has been emailed to me, and their main page to this date still has NO INFORMATION yet these people keep telling us to email them for some reason thinking thinking this will shut people up! Looks like the print industry is not dead yet all thanks to Zinio! GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER ALREADY!
Not working in New Zealand either and it is 2030hrs march 5th! And the app is still telling me to check my Internet connection! It’s a good thing I’ve been too preoccupied with my house turning to rubble in the earthquake we had last week to be bothered with rwading magazines!
Sorry that date should have been march 6th, a day and a half after you started saying Saturday morning March 5th
Still nothing in the Uk at 0800 on The 6 th. What I find more disturbing are the reports on twitter of people signing into their accounts and seeing other users account information!!!!! If this is correct it is a massive breach of UK data protection laws. I look forward to recieving assurances that my personal data is safe!!!
Hojo-
I’m Colin, a blog administrator and designer at Zinio. We assure you Zinio systems are secure. Your personal data has not been compromised in any way. You can direct any questions to site-support@zinio.com.
well here in Scotland I got some of my purchases back but the newstand is still not available. is your problem anything to do with apples new payment system coming in shortly? ie they get a 30% cut in all mag sale’s????……. if not, what is going to happen to your app if apple remove it due to your ‘in house system’ in place for payments not meeting there requirements ?
Why no definitive statement regarding the issue at hand? The Infomation you have been providing your clients has been rubbish ( general statements nothing specific ). Your clients have a right to be concerned over the security of their information.
I do hope that your problems get resolved sooner than later, and that a full disclosure is provided to your clients. You owe us that much.
Hi Tomain –
I’m Colin, administrator for the blog and a designer at Zinio. I can assure you, official statements will be forthcoming regarding the outage.
For now, be assured that the Zinio team is working nonstop to restore services as soon as possible and once they have been fully resolved we will utilize all channels to provide information and ease concern.
Colin, I’m sorry but you don’t have a good track record so far!!! I have received no e-mail telling me about the outage. There are no links on the maintanence page to any explanation. I had to go hunting on google and twitter to find any information. Once/if Zinio returns I suspect that it will all be ‘swept under the carpet’!!!! Zinio need to make this right with their customers or I fear they will go else where and not return. I, for one, have started to look for alternatives like going back to paper!!!!!!!
Thanks Colin, I guess that’s all anyone can ask for.
“I can assure you, official statements will be forthcoming regarding the outage”
When!!!!
Why not *now*!
This statement proves that you are just putting us off, feeding us nonsense, begging for our stupidity to mask your own.
Downtime is acceptable. Pitiless platitudes are not.
The sooner Apple opens their own magazine store the better.
Hojo and Ben-
I do realize you’re frustrated. I post updates to the blog the second I get them. I can’t tell you why more official statements are not coming now, nor can I guarantee a specific time for services to return.
However, I do know that the outage is being worked on and that the second more information becomes available, it will be posted here.
as is so typical with IT, that last 1% seems to be taking more time than the first 99…:(
I really hope my magazines learn to offer an alternative service, so that those of us who dont want to use Zinio (oh! for a pdf!) and its clunky reader could avoid it…
Thanks for working so hard on this Zinio. I’m sure your team will learn a lot from what’s happened here and will get a well deserved rest once you’ve solved this problem. Working with technology can be hard. Working with customers can be as well. You’re doing a great job with a great app and I look forward to my next downloads as always.
I am so looking forward to Zinio on Android.