Recent Jaxx / Zcash downtime

General
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Hey Zcash community, Anthony from Jaxx here.

I wanted to take this time to apologize to the community for the recent downtown of Zcash services in Jaxx, provide an explanation of what happened, and let you know what we are doing to minimize service interruptions in the future.

This past Sunday afternoon (EST) we began experiencing connection issues with our Zcash node. Typically when any issues arise our automated processes are quickly able to fix the problem and correct itself. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case this time and we had to manually investigate and work to get things back up and running. This was achieved Monday morning as soon as our team arrived at the office.

Although normal Zcash operations commenced, we were unable to determine the cause of the connection loss. Since then, we’ve been attempting to see why connections were lost and what we could possible do to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

Fast forward to Tuesday evening. Our automated notification system alerted us again that connection between our node and the blockchain was lost. Unfortunately, this was after office hours for both our Toronto and Argentinean teams and I was unable to communicate with our back-end team leader in Argentina until this morning (Wednesday) to rectify the situation.

We hate being down, and strive for and are proud to say we achieve 99.9% up-time. That being said, I must apologize for the length of downtime of the two recent Zcash outages. I take full responsibility for not having a better plan in place to ensure that after the first issue we would have someone available 24/7 that could initiate the processes necessary to fix the connection issues if our automated service were unable to correct itself.

Since we are a small team, offering a free service, it isn’t possible for us to have systems monitored 24/7 when everything is working well. However, when there are known issues with unknown cause, we must do better to get things back online faster than we were able to do this week.

Next steps. This morning I have a team meeting with both our Argentina and Toronto teams to work out an emergency plan that will remain in place until we are confident that the issue behind the two recent outages has been resolved. We also further prioritized the work on determining why our automated systems aren’t responding to this particular connection loss issue.

I can’t promise that services won’t be interrupted moving forward, however, I can promise that should another issue arise, communication with the Zcash community will be more responsive, as will our speed at getting services up an running again.

Again, I’d like to apologize for our recent performance. We will be better.

Anthony Diiorio
CEO & Founder Jaxx

7 Likes
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Thank you for the note, Anthony! It speaks to the professionalism of your operation that you take steps to monitor and improve such issues and take the time to reach out to the Zcash community. Considering how many different tokens and platforms Jaxx supports, I imagine operations and support must be a big job!

I don’t know if the issues Jaxx experienced had anything to do with zcash issue 2076, but it might be related, if your nodes or nodes that you were connecting to were running Zcash (“MagicBean”) v1.0.2 or earlier. I’d suggest that your team should log in to the Zcash community chat so that we can have real-time communication between the Zcash core team, the greater Zcash community, and your engineers in case of future disruptions.

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Anthony, out of curiosity, are you able to give any status update on the Jaxx on iOS issue where it basically doesn’t work (constant gray screen with nothing on it)- and your own FAQs suggest using Jaxx on another platform. I think it has been like this since November time.

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A lot of people seem to have the problem where it gray screens on iPhone and is basically unusable. Not just the ZCash side of things, but that as an app it doesn’t work on iPhone - not tried it on iPad…

Jaxx mention the issue (and are aware of it) under “iOS Wallet Issues” on this support page: https://decentral.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

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Glad it is working for some…

I like it, but have to resort to a PC to use Jaxx for anything. ZCash isn’t on the iOS version yet, but not even Bitcoin wallet works on my iPhone.

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Hey Zooko,

Thanks for the kind words. fyi we’re using v1.0.3. I’ll shoot you an email to discuss how we can better coordinate efforts.

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Hi zij,

We’re aware of the issues on certain iOS devices. The addition of more tokens in Jaxx has caused performance issues and mostly affects older phones and wallets with an abnormal amount of transactions (usually miners). Over the last many months we’ve been overhauling our architecture so that we can support the addition of more tokens and provide a better experience. This is the reason we haven’t opted to submit any new tokens (including Zcash) to the Apple app store in the last couple months. We have a major release almost completed that will be faster, more efficient, and ready for more integrations. Until then, we recommend users to work with one of our others versions (ie desktop, extension etc.).

PS. We expect to have Zcash submitted on the app store soon after the major release goes live.

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No doubt it will arrive from Jaxx soon™

1 Like