Shapeways’ Website is Down… But Don’t Worry

Update From Shapeways: 5PM EST Saturday:

This morning our data center went down, taking Shapeways.com and any other sites hosted there with it. Our data center team, as well as the tireless Shapeways tech team, are working hard on a solution. We hope to be online sometime early tomorrow morning around 6am New York Local Time, and will keep you updated here as things progress.

This is a data center issue that was unexpected and out of our control. We are just as frustrated as you are by this downtime, and we thank you for your incredible patience.

We will keep everyone updated on Facebook and on our other social channels as we come back online.

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Shapeways has quickly become one of the most trafficked 3D printing destinations on the net. The seven-year-old company has been firing on all cylinders, as they are the clear favorite when it comes consumer-based 3D printing services, within this rapidly expanding industry.

As any company grows, you expect to witness numerous growing pains, however, the management has been doing a tremendous job to avoid most of the obstacles which could have gotten in their way. Although their are competing services out their, Shapeways has been able to leverage their early-mover’s advantage to the max, and is the clear leader thus far. Providing a medium for designers to monetize their designs, as well as consumers to find thousands of customizable, unique items which they would not otherwise be able to obtain.

This morning, there seems to have been at least a little hiccup for the company, one that is likely out of their control. Within the last hour, their website has crashed, and there has not yet been any information provided as to when it could possibly go back online.

“Oh no we’re offline! Our datacenter provider is having a mass outage in NYC,” tweeted Shapeways. “Hang tight and we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

Data center outages are not uncommon, and in our experience can last minutes to several hours. It’s nice to see that Shapeways was on top of things, able to update us all via their Twitter feed, although their Tweet has contradicted a statement posted on their server when a user visits Shapeways.com, It reads:

“We’re making some changes to our site architecture to bring Shapeways further into the future. We’ll be back any moment now. Thanks for your patience.”

Our guess is that the message on their website is simply left over from a previous server upgrade or maintenance they had performed.

Anyway, don’t panic, I’m sure they will be back shortly, and you all may continue ordering your figurines of Grumpy Cat, Doge, and Sad Keanu. We will update this article as things progress or if we hear further information on the cause of this outage. Discuss in the Shapeways Outage forum thread on 3DPB.com