Viber: Server upgrade caused downtime in uploads

MESSAGING application Viber said an upgrade in its server systems caused a downtime in its upload of photos.

«On Sept. 26, 2023, at 9 a.m. (Manila time), our monitoring services detected a slowdown in media file serving,» Viber said in a statement on Wednesday.

«After inspection, our tech teams identified that the root cause of the issue was a maintenance upgrade of an AWS [Amazon Web Services] media server (Ansible v2.9.23-1.amzn2),» it said.

Viber admitted that the upgrade resulted in 2 percent of Philippine users experiencing difficulties in sending and receiving files for four hours.

«The upgrade included a configuration change that in turn caused an issue that prevented us from catering to growing demand for sending and receiving media via the app,» Viber said.

After the four-hour downtime, all Viber services were restored.

It also said no user information was compromised because of the brief downtime on Tuesday.

«In line with our constant investment in the security and privacy of our users and the robust measures applied to ensure such protections, we can assure that no user information has been compromised because of this issue,» Viber assured.

«All private user communication is end-to-end encrypted, and once delivered, it's automatically and permanently deleted from our infrastructure, remaining only on the users' devices,» it said.

On Tuesday, the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) first detected the downtime of Viber at 10 a.m., an hour after Viber detected the problem itself.