By Constantin Jacob

Our team had the desire to publish a proper status page for a long time. There were a few obstacles in the way initially as we did not have any resources or policy in place to maintain the page. We also got away with not truly having much to report the majority of time. Even if there were issues on one particular node, our service will automatically reroute our customer’s traffic using an operational node in the same location with the help of some backend logic. Most of what happens with our server locations is hardly ever impacting connected customers, but we also understand that providing a status page offers yet another form of transparency that is important for us to uphold for the benefit of our customers.

This year we have put forth real effort to follow through with this transparency by putting together https://status.guardianapp.com. It has now been operational for a few months, and we are quite pleased with the ability to effectively communicate with our customers and provide such a resource for anyone to access.

We built this with our customers in mind, but it’s a win for our support team too, giving them a quick, shareable link to answer any questions about the status of our service. It allows our customers to inform themselves and puts them once again in control to get immediate answers to any questions regarding the status of our service. Because anyone can check the status page, we don’t need to track who is affected or collect contact details to notify them. That’s data we’d rather not have in the first place.

Of course, as soon as we launched the status page, we seem to have jinxed ourselves. After a long stretch of smooth sailing, the past few months have been anything but quiet. Unexpected hardware failures gave us more than a few headaches, and we worked hard to keep everything running smoothly so your traffic stayed protected. At the same time, we’ve been making fundamental changes to our server-side technology stack to bring you new features like Stealth Mode.

Our status page is operated by a third party vendor which includes the ability to receive E-Mail updates. If you would like to be notified about planned maintenance ahead of time or notified of any outage happening in real time, simply add your email to subscribe to these updates. We chose Instatus to host our status page after reviewing how they handle data, and we’re confident they share our commitment to privacy. You can read their privacy policy for yourself.