Tailscale Down

Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

fasz

100 points

58 comments

status.tailscale.comTechstoryHigh profile

skepticalnegative

Debate

40/100

TailscaleOutageNetworkingDevops

Key topics

Tailscale

Outage

Networking

Devops

Tailscale is experiencing an outage, causing users to lose access to their devices and connections, with some commenters speculating about the cause and impact.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

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Based on 45 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Nov 19, 2025 at 5:08 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Nov 19, 2025 at 5:11 PM EST
3m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
15 comments in 1-2h
Hottest window of the conversation
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04Latest activity
Nov 20, 2025 at 3:38 AM EST
about 2 months ago
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Discussion (58 comments)

Showing 45 comments of 58

tapppi

about 2 months ago

2 replies

Both the web interface and connections are down now. Was just fiddling with my private DNS serving both my local network and tailnet, when I lost access to the device listing around 20 minutes ago. Now I also cannot connect through tailnet IPs anymore. EDIT: took me a good minute to realise this too, as I thought I'd just screwed up something in my Pi's ipv6 configuration for the 3rd time in an hour.

P.S. you beat me to posting by 1 minute! Happy to see there was an option to hide my submission, never needed that before.

tapppi

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Connections through tailnet are back, website is still down

tapppi

about 2 months ago

Website is also back, nice recovery speed by tailscale

gnabgib

about 2 months ago

1 reply

hide just removes the submission from your page/new, it doesn't remove it from HN.. delete does that.

tapppi

about 2 months ago

Good to know, but then again, I don't see such an option for my submission. Guess I'll just have to live with it.

clarkmoody

about 2 months ago

2 replies

Massive outages of core Internet services popping up shortly after corps firing devs and bragging about AI writing more of their code.

timenotwasted

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I could be mistaken but I don't recall Tailscale being one of these?

jakebasile

about 2 months ago

Tailscale is definitely not one of that crowd. Their CEO had some very reasonable takes on AI and developers on LinkedIn / their blog (linked in a sibling comment).

waterTanuki

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Tailscale isn't a massive corp, more like a Series B startup. And the CEO's take on LLMs is a sober one, not based on hype.

https://tailscale.com/blog/ai-changes-developers

bnjms

about 2 months ago

I’m sorry, Apenwarr is the Tailscale ceo?

Weird how you notice a few names on a message board then they disappear to do something new.

poly2it

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I was going crazy trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to our supercomputer an hour ago. Relieved to know it was a global outage!

para_parolu

about 2 months ago

1 reply

As someone pointed out recently here: no one gets fired for AWS outage

poly2it

about 2 months ago

Are you replying to me?

sureglymop

about 2 months ago

7 replies

Nothing personal against tailscale but I hope it drives the point home that leaving the hosting of the key exchange server for your mesh network to an external entity is a little bit ridiculous.

creddit

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Are self-hosted solutions impervious to outages? I wasn't aware.

the_gipsy

about 2 months ago

Who said that

mikeocool

about 2 months ago

1 reply

My self hosted stuff has outages too. The even more annoying part is that it stays broken until I get around to fixing it.

petcat

about 2 months ago

Imagine if stays broken until somebody else gets around to fixing it

UltraSane

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Cloud providers have enormous economic incentive to recover from outages as fast as possible and can bring many more people to help, often ones who wrote the code and designed the system. I once worked for a state government where the exchange server was down for two weeks.

briffle

about 2 months ago

I had to deal with a state Medicaid system that would go down often. If it crashed after 5pm, it was down until the next morning when someone rebooted the SunOS box. (Yes, they just rebooted the box, and no, in 2014 it was still sunos, not Solaris). Meanwhile, it’s messing up pharmacy authorization for thousand of elderly and low income people in the state ….

myko

about 2 months ago

1 reply

For me tailscale being down just means I can't access things I'm not comfortable exposing publicly outside my home. It isn't a huge deal as I rarely have that need.

brewdad

about 2 months ago

And if I am at home, the box is upstairs. I can connect a keyboard and monitor and continue about my business.

bithavoc

about 2 months ago

with Tailscale Lock you have a lot more control, you can also self-host your coordinator server which is an alternative even mentioned in the service docs[0]

[0] https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

mbesto

about 2 months ago

If your key exchange server is on us-east-1 are you also ridiculous?

nntwozz

about 2 months ago

I heat my house with a wood stove, I'm not part of the energy grid.

I run my own WireGuard because I like to be the one responsible.

To each their own, no need for snark comments.

pepemon

about 2 months ago

1 reply

AFAIK, only new connections can't be established, the already connected clients will continue to work.

PrairieFire

about 2 months ago

Pretty sure that was the case. I heavily use Tailscale at work and have been working steady on multiple VNC connected clients over Tailscale Wireguard tunnels without issue. Just wrapped it up for the day and hit the ‘ol watering hole (hackernews) to see this. I didn’t connect/disconnect or have to use the portal during that time period, but my in place connections were fine.

arthurcolle

about 2 months ago

3 replies

Thought this was for a product release called Down. Might be time to go outside for me

seemaze

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Tailscale Down® - Unscheduled network downtime to engage in the immediate needs of your meat sack existence. Eat food, speak with other meat sacks, expel food, touch grass!

arthurcolle

about 2 months ago

Tailscale Down™ - What goes up must come...

fade out

Uncertainty as a Service®

incanus77

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Totally appropriate if your Tailnet name is goose-rappel.

arthurcolle

about 2 months ago

I'll have to tell my ducks about this one

antiloper

about 2 months ago

Had to have a double take when they released Tailscale Drive. Almost thought I could add my car to my tailnet now.

metadat

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Magic DNS has been broken on Android for weeks, ever since One UI 8.0 was released. No monitoring dashboard for features AFAICT. Bummer.

metadat

about 2 months ago

For example, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/Tailscale/comments/1onqe58/android_...

I'm surprised TS Team doesn't monitor it for issues.

arjie

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Oh this is unlucky. I'm not affected because I use headscale (for my home network), but this is one of those companies I root for because the product is so good. We used to have manually managed Wireguard (one end terminating at Router) to create the similar effect and for my home, this is way nicer.

theshrike79

about 2 months ago

It's getting to a point where I _want_ to pay for it so I can demand better service from them :)

Just having tailscale ssh is so damn useful when you've got a bunch of servers virtual and physical and co-located. Just get them to the tailnet and ssh via Tailscale. No need to open SSH ports.

LouisvilleGeek

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Self host with Headscale.

LorenDB

about 2 months ago

My Headscale instance is working perfectly. Glad I didn't just use Tailscale for my homelab.

rvz

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Looking forward to the post-mortem.

deskamess

about 2 months ago

Yep... cant wait for them 'unwrap' the reason.

apitman

about 2 months ago

Would love to see something like Tailscale but local-first, where your devices use Bluetooth, mDNS, NFC, QR codes, etc for signaling and only fall back to STUN/TURN as a last resort.

seemaze

about 2 months ago

Just arrived from perusing the headscale repo for the nth time. I really should deploy one of these days...

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

itsdrewmiller

about 2 months ago

Good luck tailscale, I love how much value I get out of your free tier for my home servers!

nirav72

about 2 months ago

Lemme guess - us-east-1?

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