We are experiencing performance problem across all Zoho services right now (as of 6:30 AM Pacific Time). Our team is looking at it.

Please use read-only versions, which are hosted from our separate data center.

These are the URLs:

Zoho CRM:  https://crm-ro.zoho.com

Zoho Creator: https://creator-ro.zoho.com

Zoho Invoice: https://invoice-ro.zoho.com

Zoho Mail: https://mail-ro.zoho.com

We are working on this right now, and we will post updates as soon as we have additional information.

Update: We are experiencing packet loss on our network access paths, and we are working on it right now.

Update 2 9:13 AM PST: We have brought down the degree of packet loss, but still due to intermittent packet loss services are slow. We are working on it.

Update 3: As of 9:30 AM PST packet loss has been reduced to negligible levels. Services should be accessible now, but we are still monitoring closely.…

Zoho’s strategy from the beginning has been to provide a wide portfolio of online applications so that you can focus on your business while we take care of the rest. Over time, we have launched many applications that support this mission. But from time to time we need look back and assess how those products are doing in relation to our expectations. Even the most well-tended gardens need some pruning every now and then!

We have decided to sunset some Zoho services so that we can focus our energy and delight our customers with our other products. Today we are announcing we will close

• Zoho Challenge
• Zoho CommentBox
• Zoho Planner
• Zoho Plugin for Office
• Zoho Share
• Zoho Viewer

Customers are, as always, our #1 priority. So you have plenty of time to get your data out we will continue to allow access to these products (in read-only mode) until December 31st, 2012.…

In 2008, I wrote a post Why We Compete with Google, in response to the persistent question at that time “How can you guys survive Google in the online office space?”

My basic argument was that business software, due to its extensive sales and support requirements, simply does not have the productivity or profitability of consumer internet businesses, and could never produce the margins that Google enjoys in search or what Facebook enjoys in social networking today or for that matter how today’s margins at over-the-hill Yahoo and getting-there eBay compare to the still-hot Salesforce. I concluded that post (keep in mind it was written in 2008) with:

When push comes to shove – and there is a lot of very messy push and shove in the business software market -  Google’s resources are going to flow into figuring out how to monetize the humongous traffic of YouTube or compete in online auctions, rather than figure out a way to squeeze a bit more margin compared to Oracle or Adobe or Salesforce.

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We had a 3.5 hour outage of Zoho Mail, Zoho Support & Zoho Books, between 8:45 AM and 12:15 pm PST on December 14.  First of all, I want to apologize to our customers and our users. We let you down and we are sorry.  We know how important it is to have access to the vital business information you entrust with Zoho; our entire company runs on Zoho applications, so we understand this in an even more intimate way. With a view to preventing such incidents and improving our response to them when they do happen, we reviewed the root cause of this outage and our response to it. This post provides a summary.

The outage arose from a simple configuration gap between our software applications and the network. One part of the health-check mechanism built into our software (ironically, the very part that is designed to prevent an outage impacting customers) made an unneeded reverse DNS request to resolve an IP address to a name.…

We have restored all Zoho services. They should be working normally. Our teams are monitoring the situation closely, and if you encounter any trouble, please let us know.

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