
A worldwide service disruption affected Proton’s privacy-focused online platforms on Thursday, stemming from complications during the company’s infrastructure migration to Kubernetes. The outage, which began at approximately 10:00 AM ET, impacted all major Proton services including VPN, Mail, Calendar, Drive, Pass, and Wallet.
The incident was triggered by a software modification that created an unexpected load spike when user connections surged around 4 PM Zurich time. The change severely restricted new connections to Proton’s database servers, overwhelming the company’s infrastructure and preventing normal service delivery.
While most services, including Proton VPN, Pass, Drive/Docs, and Wallet, were quickly restored, Mail and Calendar experienced prolonged issues. During the outage, approximately 50% of user requests failed, resulting in intermittent service availability. The ongoing migration to Kubernetes, which required maintaining two parallel infrastructures, complicated the company’s ability to balance the increased load effectively.
The technical team required approximately two hours to restore full functionality, with users experiencing degraded performance during the recovery period. Service quality improved significantly during the second hour, though complete resolution took an additional hour. Proton has confirmed that all connection issues have been resolved and continues to monitor system stability.
Users attempting to access affected services during the outage encountered error messages indicating connection failures. The company maintains that despite the temporary disruption, the situation has since stabilized, with all services operating normally.