Update 2: Prezi is back online again! Maintenance session finished successfully. Thanks for your patience, sorry for the possible inconvenience!

Update: Hello, you have been redirected here from Prezi.com. The server upgrade process has begun on schedule. This will take approximately one hour. Keep in touch, browse older posts, or check Prezi on Twitter! Continue reading for details.

A small inconvenience followed by big profit is a fair deal. Though when it comes to (even scheduled) server maintenance, there is no win-win situation, so we’ll try to do this as fast and clean as we can. Here are the milestones of Prezi’s scheduled server maintenance:

1. When: First of all, we know exactly (and tell you of course) the planned duration of Prezi server maintenance. This information helps you schedule your work session with Prezi. It’s Sunday, 7th June from 8 am to 9 am UTC. You’ll be able follow the process on our Twitter page and here on the blog (If you are not familiar with this time zone, check the converter).

2. What: During the upgrade, our online services will be unavailable. This means the following:

• You won’t be able to reach Prezi.com, the online editor,
• You can’t login or reach your online Prezis from PreziDesktop (offline editor available for Pro users).
• You can still edit, and export presentations with PreziDesktop in offline mode (since the software is not necessarily connected to the internet).
• Of course you can even show your Prezis during downtime, if you have previously downloaded them to your desktop.

3. How: The whole process takes one hour. If you’ll try to access Prezi.com in this period, you’ll be redirected to this blog. You can comment to the dedicated post, or ask any questions at Prezisupport on Twitter while our data center is offline. Once the upgrade has finished, we will notify you immediately on the blog and on Twitter as well.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience this may cause!

We recieve many emails every day about business offers, technical questions, ideas and thoughts on Prezi. Sometimes you  just drop a few lines in our mailboxes to say hello, or send us links to your unique presentations. Thank you for your support, feedback is extremely important for us when developing Prezi. To manage different topics more effectively, we have now defined new pages on Prezi.com. Support

• When you click Support in the footer of the front page, you’ll find useful information bits that might help you finding faster answers to your questions. We have linked the Prezi Manual here, with useful tricks and tips on different editing issues like inserting media files and sound, embedding with iFrame, navigating with keyboard shortcuts, frames and grouping objects, etc. It’s all explained step-by-step, screenshots illustrated.
• Prezi is fun to use, still there are some temporary issues we are aware of, and working on right now. We have a dynamic collection of these annoying bugs, we will update the list constantly as we eliminate them. You spare time, we spare time if you don’t warn us about things we already know.
• To communicate technical issues, workarounds, and tricks about Prezi editing, we use Getsatisfaction’s costumer service. If you’ve checked the manual, the bug list, and still don’t have a clue, you’ll most likely find a matching topic there.

Contact We have also changed content under Contact. Now you can find an email address dedicated to sales matters, a link to the Support page, and the About page here. Clicking About leads to direct email connection to our team members. Feel free to email us at anytime! Since our office is located in Budapest, and many of you are not, we have also insterted a time zone calculator on this page. See if it’s day or night at Prezi HQ!

In the darkest hours of the datacenter crash on monday, we have decided we must compensate our users who had been put at great disadvantage because of the server downtime.

We know that anything we can do now is post traumatic and too late yet today we personally contact those of you who reported different bad situations for they couldn’t reach their work online in time to discuss a personal compensation.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you were seriously affected by the unwanted event, and haven’t been emailed yet. Sorry once again for the datacenter faliure, we have already made steps to ensure this will not happen again.

After a day of misery, sadness, nightmare here at our lab, Prezi is back to normal.

1 – we learned a lot, and are already working on ways not to get here ever again

2 – we will compensate you for this, updates about this will come in a notice at Prezi.com/my and here as well

Please, dear all, give us some more trust and keep zooming.

CEO’s comments

Some people have contacted us asking about the name of our hosting company, but we are not in the naming and shaming business. Europe is also not as litigation oriented as other parts of the world. So the only thing we can to do is to pledge a forceful capacity and redundancy increase. This will happen in the matter of days.

Btw, if you have a quality hosting service that you’d like to offer, please contact us.

Summary: what happened, when we expect to solve it?

Now that we can actually see a deadline when this nightmare is going to end (hopefully by 11 12 pm UTC our servers will be running again), we could stop worrying for a second and actually started to think what is coming next. We are completely aware of the fact, that what has happened today is unacceptable. This isn’t something you can expect from a web service provider. We know that it is our responsibility to make sure that our service is up and running all the time, so we can only hope that you believe us when we say this was totally out of our hands.

What we’ll do to make sure this won’t happen again?

The biggest lesson we had to learn today is that we must choose a global provider. Someone who we can rely on  just as you can rely on our service. We are not a big company yet but the tool we have developed has visibly outgrown the environment we used for distribution. Soon we’ll set up a public uptime policy, and will give free licence augmentation for our users after the downtime hours in compensation. We hope we can leave this terrible day behind us soon and can focus on further developments of Prezi. Thank you for understanding and sorry again for the inconvenience.

* * *

UPDATE: we have just been informed by our provider that the servers will be up and running before 11 pm U.T.C today.

UPDATE: now at 10.36 U.T.C. we don’t believe this

Hours ago of our servers went down due to a failure at our datacenter. We also know it’s unendurable.

Let us explain this very embarassing data center downtime we have to face for… hours now. As the first pieces of information arrived from the provider, we believed this will be a minor, yet very inconvenient issue, so we tried to keep you informed as we were, via Twitter, email, and this blog. For hours we didn’t have any kind of information, so we understand that you have to see how confusing this issue turned out to be.

Our office is in Budapest, we are sitting here around a huge table trying at least to communicate with our users about the issue. Our german provider company has its servers in France, our system administrators could only reach them via a livechat window on their website. The guy who replied us hours ago is in London on holiday. He is the only one who can reach the providers office, where people are sitting around other tables calling the men who are actually working in the server rooms.

We learned that our case is labelled high priority now, but as you may now see we don’t recieve any more info on this than any of you already have. Of course we have learned a lot from this case, so please be patient for a little more time. We post every piece of info we know on Prezi’s Twitter page and here right away.

…but we have to pull our servers for 5-10 minutes twice (around 2230 UTC, April 27 and 0530 UTC, April 28) during the day because of hardware maintenance.

We are really sorry for the series of downtimes, but our system engineers are doing their best to keep the service alive.