Dotloop was offline all of the working day Wednesday and parts of Tuesday as a result of an “unexpected issue” that occurred Tuesday, leaving some of its customers surprised and stuck without a working transaction management platform.
Dotloop CEO Austin Allison told Inman News that the issue should be solved by end of day on Wednesday, however, some users, who say they weren’t notified of the downed system but found out when they tried to log in, are exasperated.
Ellen Friedman, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Cambridge, Mass., says she first learned of the problem when she logged in to the platform at 11 a.m. Eastern time today and just saw the dotloop “ball rolling around the site.”
Keller Williams, which baked dotloop into its eEdge platform in 2011, was the first to officially notify Friedman, she said, in an email at 2:05 p.m. Eastern.
Now, visitors to dotloop’s website are greeted with the following message: “We discovered an unexpected issue that caused a brief outage yesterday. The issue has been identified and we made the proactive decision to take all systems offline while it is being resolved. Your information is secure and all systems are still running, just not accessible from the Internet. We apologize for this inconvenience and expect to be back online by end of day.”
Initial speculation about the outage was that it was related to the Cincinnati-based firm’s upgrade to the new version of its platform that it announced and rolled out in June. But dotloop now says that the problem was an “unexpected issue” with no more details at the moment.
That’s left agents like Friedman to do business the old-fashioned way, and a bit frustrated. Friedman said she had an offer due in today at 5 p.m. Eastern that was inaccessible in the dotloop system that she had to rewrite.
“I can understand it being out for an hour or a couple of hours, but all day?” she said. As of 7:40 p.m. Eastern, she said she still had not received an email from dotloop.
Other agents expressed their frustration on dotloop’s Facebook post about its system being down.
Screen shot of some comments on dotloop’s Facebook post on the system being down.
“As reflected on our maintenance page, it was a proactive decision to pull the system offline,” Allison said. “The issue is being resolved and we plan to go back online by end of the evening. We have been in contact with our users and provided a means for continued business while we are offline. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our users’ patience.”
In February, dotloop reported that 75 percent of Keller Williams Realty agents and 16 percent of Re/Max agents were using its platform. A handful of state and local Realtor associations have made dotloop available to their members, most recently the New Mexico and Nebraska associations.
