Last.fm is usually so reliable that it being down seems almost unnatural. Hope they're back soon, one of the few online services I feel is actually worth paying for.

Extremely unusual. Last.fm has one of the best uptimes of any large site with lots of constant traffic that I know of. I hope it's something benign and not some catastrophic event.

Does anyone know how Last.fm is doing? I still love it, but I've seen a lot of friends move away from it, to services that don't quite do the same like Spotify and Grooveshark.

Is that just my friends or have they experienced a massive exodus? I'd be sad if CBS pulled the plug at some point in the near future.

I'm slightly obsessed with scrobbling and checking what I've been listening to over the last [N] months. And last.fm recommendations beat every other service I've come across.

But in terms of actual listening; I barely use it.

I still use it, and most of my friends still use it, though I suspect that using it solely for the statistics probably makes me (well, my friends too) an odd man out.

The only time I've ever considered switching was when I was debating writing a program to take the statistics myself, but then again... why bother?

Regardless, I know way more people using last.fm than I do who use Grooveshark, and I don't really know anybody who uses Spotify. I'm not worried about last, but you never know, maybe I should be.

You might be interested in a side project of mine, that lets you visualise your last.fm listening history. I'm looking for feedback (and the touch of a designer) before I launch it.

http://markhansen.co.nz/scatter.fm

I enjoy using it as a statistics aggregator as well. Last.fm definitely gets credit for capturing the primal sense of achievement with scrobbling. People I know don't really use it as a social network other than friending each other, but even that is sufficient because it allows you to peek into their current musical tastes. It's sort of elegant how Last.fm's experience is pretty much just collecting data and displaying it nicely; no need for apps, uploading user content, or location-based gimmicks. Just listening to your music library is generating content enough.

As far as listening goes, most people I know use Pandora.

Here's a free software replacement for last.fm scrobbling: http://libre.fm/

I still use last.fm myself though.

Also http://like.fm.

I use it: http://like.fm/chris

That really does seem like a worst-case scenario (although at least they have backups).

I'd be really interested in how it happened.

I wonder if there's a cosmic law that makes such failures happen disproportionately on Sunday.

They should change the error message that shows up when people try to look at their music history ...

"There was an error connecting to your Library. A page refresh should fix this problem."

... if I didn't read Hacker News I'd be sitting there hitting refresh a bunch of times :D Perhaps something simple like "please try back later" and link to the original blog post.

Hope they get things resolved and CBS doesn't give them grief for the outage. I've got almost six years of listening history on Last.fm and would hate to see it go away.

> if I didn't read Hacker News I'd be sitting there hitting refresh a bunch of times

Then I know some things that may help you in the future. At the bottom of almost every page at Last.fm there four columns of links. In the column named "Get Help" there is a link that says "System Status" which goes to: http://status.last.fm/ where you can see how different parts of the site are running and a short explanation if there is a problem. I've never seen the system status page go down, even when there are problems on other parts of the site.

One time when Last.fm had some problem the links at the bottom of the page went away. Since then I find it handy to have a bookmark to the system status page.

Another thing to check are the forums (I wanna say fora :-), especially the Web Site Support forum: http://www.last.fm/forum/21713 . Usually the users of the site notice problems before explanations go up at the system status page and someone asks a question what is going on. The staff usually answers, explain what is going on and sometimes say an estimate of when the problem will be solved. In short, there are more details in the web site support forum than on the system status page.

Hope this helps. :-)

Since the originally submitted link was deleted from last.fm's forums, here's the replacement, and a link to their blog:

http://blog.last.fm/2011/07/18/library-and-streaming-service...

http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/756231

In the past 3 years or so I've used Last.fm almost non-stop. It had to be some kind of hack or hosting service explosion.

Details here, if you haven't seen them: http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/756000

Now deleted.

Netflix is down too, coincidental?