Protonmail Down – What Happened and How It Affected Users

On February 28, 2023, ProtonMail experienced a significant outage that left its users unable to access their encrypted email accounts. The outage was caused by a technical issue with ProtonMail's infrastructure.

Users reported difficulties sending and receiving emails, with many taking to social media to express their frustration. Some users were unable to access their accounts for several hours, while others reported being locked out of their accounts entirely.

The outage was a major inconvenience for ProtonMail users, who rely on the service for secure and private communication.

Protonmail outages can be frustrating, especially when you're trying to stay secure online. Protonmail has experienced several outages in the past, with the most recent one occurring in September 2025.

Protonmail's outages are often caused by network issues, which can be due to a variety of factors such as server overload, outages, or maintenance. In some cases, the company's infrastructure migration to Kubernetes and software changes have also contributed to outages.

The company's status page is a good resource to check for updates on outages. For example, during the September 2025 outage, Proton's status page reported intermittent network issues affecting some users, with the company working to fully restore services as soon as possible.

Protonmail's outages can be unpredictable, and users have reported error messages stating "Something went wrong. We couldn't load this page. Please refresh the page or check your internet connection." In some cases, users have experienced degraded performance or intermittent service unavailability.

Protonmail's commitment to privacy remains intact even during outages, with user data remaining secure due to end-to-end encryption. The company's innovative methods for data recovery, such as recovery phrases and files, ensure that encryption keys are protected and accessible only to the user.

Here's a summary of Protonmail's outages:

Users can check the status of Protonmail services by visiting the company's status page or using third-party tools to monitor the service's availability. If you're experiencing issues with Protonmail, you can submit a comment on the status page to report the problem and help others who may be experiencing similar issues.

Protonmail has made efforts to resolve outages quickly, with the company restoring services within a few hours in some cases. However, the company's infrastructure migration to Kubernetes and software changes have contributed to outages, highlighting the need for ongoing maintenance and improvement of the service.

Proton Mail's infrastructure is designed to keep user data secure even during outages, thanks to end-to-end encryption and zero-access architecture.

The outage started at approximately 10:00 AM ET, affecting most Proton services, including Proton Mail and Calendar, due to networking issues.

Proton restored connectivity to Proton Mail at 12:37 PM EST, with the service being confirmed restored by BleepingComputer.

All services were fully restored by 1:27 PM ET, according to Proton.

Despite the outage, Proton Mail's commitment to privacy was not compromised, with the company stating that it only provides minimal information, such as recovery email addresses, when legally compelled.

Here's a summary of the outage timeline:

Protonmail's services outage was a significant issue that affected many users. The outage started at approximately 10:00 AM ET and lasted for several hours, with Proton Mail and Calendar being the last services to be restored.

During the outage, users experienced error messages stating "Something went wrong. We couldn't load this page. Please refresh the page or check your internet connection." The issues were caused by an ongoing infrastructure migration to Kubernetes and a software change that triggered an initial load spike.

Proton's team worked to resolve the issue, and the service was available, but only intermittently, with performance being substantially improved during the second hour of the incident. The situation was stable for some time, and Proton has since resolved all connection issues affecting its online services.

The outage was not caused by a data breach or privacy violation, but rather by a software issue that limited the number of new connections to Proton's database servers. This overloaded Proton's infrastructure, making it impossible to serve all customer connections.

Here is a summary of the outage timeline:

Proton users were unable to connect to their accounts, including ProtonVPN, Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Wallet, due to networking issues.

The outage started at approximately 10:00 AM ET, causing inconvenience to users.

Some users still experienced error messages stating, "Something went wrong. We couldn't load this page. Please refresh the page or check your internet connection" when attempting to connect to ProtonMail.

Proton Mail and Proton Calendar continued to suffer outages even after most services were restored.

Proton restored connectivity to Proton Mail at 12:37 PM EST, and users can now access their accounts.

Proton is still working on restoring connectivity to Proton Calendar.

The duration and extent of a service outage can be crucial in determining the impact on users.

The service status history for Protonmail.com shows that the website was down for a total of 5 hours and 35 minutes on September 8th and 9th.

During this time, the ping time was consistently high, ranging from 272.56 ms to 318.73 ms.

The longest period of downtime was 2 hours and 55 minutes, from 17:14 to 20:19 on September 8th.

Here is a breakdown of the downtime periods:

The extent of the outage is also evident in the service status graph, which shows a significant spike in response time during the downtime periods.

During the Proton Mail services outage, users experienced inconvenience, but the company's commitment to privacy remained intact.

The outage did not involve any data breaches or privacy violations, which is a testament to Proton Mail's robust security measures.

Proton Mail's infrastructure, including end-to-end encryption and zero-access architecture, ensured that user data remained secure even during the outage.

The company's innovative approach to data recovery, using recovery phrases and files, protected encryption keys and kept them accessible only to the user.

Proton Mail issued an apology for the inconvenience caused and appreciated users' patience as services were gradually restored.

The apology showed that the company values transparency and customer satisfaction, even in the face of technical issues.

Proton worldwide outage was caused by a Kubernetes migration and software change, which triggered an initial load spike. This overloaded Proton's infrastructure, making it impossible to serve all customer connections.

The outage started around 10:00 AM ET, with users unable to connect to their Proton VPN, Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Wallet accounts. Error messages stated, "Something went wrong. We couldn't load this page. Please refresh the page or check your internet connection."

Proton's infrastructure migration to Kubernetes required running two parallel infrastructures at the same time, making it impossible to balance the load. This led to intermittent service unavailability for some users.

The issues were fully resolved within about two hours, with Proton Mail and Proton Calendar being the last services brought back online. As of 16:15 CET, all services other than Mail and Calendar were operating normally.

Here's a breakdown of the timeline of the outage:

Proton has since resolved all connection issues affecting its online services and is currently monitoring for additional issues. The situation has been stable for some time, but the company is still working on fully restoring services.