So, I was/am being affected by the recent downtime for all Plex authentication (roughly the last hour - I seem to be in now, but been having spotty accessibility issues the past hour or so, even locally). The status.plex.tv site jokingly lists this incident as “Performance Degraded” when in fact it should say, “Can’t Log In” or “Plex is completely inaccessible” or “Down.”
My question is - during a state where authentication, itself, is an issue, what are course(s) of action a user can take to attempt to contact Plex about resolution? Since Authentication was down, I could not log in to the Forums (until now) and even if I can, that’s a Forum, not a Support chat/incident/email/etc. so it’s not like I expect responses anytime soon.
Also tried pinging the Plex group on Facebook, no luck there. I’ll be leaving FB soon so really, social media isn’t a valid backup, IMNSHO, but if it were it would be nice to know.
“Contact” on the plex.tv website (which, btw, at one point, I couldn’t even access because it kept spitting up a 500 error) just takes me to the Forums.
Is our only feasible course to “wait it out and hope it gets better?” Because, from this recent experience of mine, it looks like that is the case. If we can’t trust status.plex.tv (still lists as “Degraded Performance” but I’m having all kinds of access problems), and there’s no incident system, what other options do we have?
Plex doesn’t have direct support beyond these forums. But even if they did, support would just tell you to watch the status page (which is the case for pretty much any online service, not picking on Plex there).
True, but where it says degraded performance it would be nice to see the expected impact. Such as a one liner explaining access to plex will be affected even at the local level.
I appreciate the suggestion but I work in network security and don’t feel comfortable opening these ports/networks up like that (I don’t even like how I have to port forward through my firewalls). I guess I can consider it in the future but the issue even then is, if I change my mind during an authentication outage and say, “Okay, I’ll turn this on because I just lost access” - I can’t log in to make that change! So it’s something someone would have to set ahead of time, or I’d have to hack the configuration files directly as mentioned in that article.
Thanks all, this was the general gist of answers I expected but hoped I wouldn’t get. No offense, I do appreciate the feedback.
I agree that with its incredibly modest one-time fee structure, Plex Pass isn’t something you ideally should be able to call into with any issue you want and have them fixed, I was just hoping there was some kind of alternative feedback mechanism, especially for Plex Pass subscribers, that allows for a more direct portal as to what is going on.
The status given on status.plex.tv was wrong and probably geared towards making sure Plex’s metrics for uptime are as savory as possible, without telling the actual truth of the matter. For almost two hours, at least, today there was a complete inability to log in to either the global website, the forums, or one’s own media system (unless those users intentionally ditched local security). Further, there was no method possible to either know the TRUE status of if Plex even knew about the issue, how far along the remedy they were, or an estimated restoration of service time. And finally, worst of all, an incorrect error was shown on the status screen for the duration - “Degraded Performance” would imply everything was working, just slower, which is factually inaccurate on every level.
I’m just hoping someone from Plex reads this, understands that proper communication of actual outages is something anyone should expect from a cloud service, be it free or paid (in any form of payment), and takes that feedback to their group - as I’m sure this wasn’t the first outage (just the most immediate one I’ve directly experienced) and unfortunately, I know it won’t be the last…
So it’s something someone would have to set ahead of time, or I’d have to hack the configuration files directly as mentioned in that article.
No offense, I do appreciate the feedback.