Bitbucket wobbles but it won't fall. Oh, snap...

Atlassian's code shack goes TITSUP*, has a coffee and feels much better now, thanks

Updated Hey developers! Thinking of stomping off in a huff to Bitbucket when Microsoft finally closes the GitHub deal? Well...

After a few weeks of tottering like a drunk balancing on a traffic cone, code hosting service Bitbucket demonstrated that anything GitHub could do, it could do just as well, by, er, falling over for an hour or so this morning before gingerly climbing back onto its perch.

Problems kicked off at 0800 UTC this morning as developers, keen as mustard to get cracking on their latest and greatest project found that Bitbucket was not playing ball at all. Pretty much every service was down, from pipelines through to actually getting at code.

Forlorn coders did what they normally do when services go down, and took to social media to share their misfortune. And also the wondrous simplicity of Bitbucket’s error page.

Its my internet or @Bitbucket is dead? pic.twitter.com/tylNg8faEt

— isccarrasco (@isccarrasco) October 25, 2018

Don’t worry @iscarrasco, it wasn’t your internet. And Bitbucket wasn’t dead. It was just having a little nap. Like that parrot.

As the service lurched back to life, Bitbucket's Twitter orifice squirted out the good news.

Resolved: Bitbucket services have recovered. https://t.co/HCiKYJD3Fx

— Bitbucket Status (@BitbucketStatus) October 25, 2018

We have contacted Bitbucket to find out what happened today and also get the lowdown on why the service has been quite so wobbly of late. Annoyed users have been quick to remark that, for a paid service, things have been a bit shoddy.

Reliability for @Bitbucket has been abysmal lately. As a paying customer we expect better and are seriously considering other options.

— Martijn Heemels (@martijnheemels) October 25, 2018

A look at BitBucket’s status page of shame shows problems bubbling away throughout October, with elevated error rates, ill-thought through server updates making repository artifacts unavailable and so on. It doesn’t make happy reading for coders thinking of making the jump following GitHub’s woes at the weekend.

Bitbucket itself was snapped up by Atlassian back in 2010 and has had a few moments since that left developers with some more grey hairs, such as a two day outage back in January this year. This time around the company was not so quick to update its status page, which continued to insist everything was fine even as the clamouring ramped up.

Our thanks to the eagle-eyed Reg reader who alerted us to the outage. ®

Updated to add at 0852 on 26 October:

An Atlassian spokesperson has been in touch to say: "Bitbucket did experience an outage on October 25. We were alerted to an issue within our database layer, and were able to respond and restore service within 30 minutes. No data was lost, but we know that our customers were disrupted. In the same way that we handle every incident, we’re in the process of conducting a thorough incident review to ensure we prevent future downtime."

* Tottering Interface To Sourcecode Utter Pants