Garage Door Co Repair Pros has received numerous customer calls regarding the MyQ outage which occurred 06/07/2018 and lasted until 06/08/2018. In fact our own MyQ openers began failing at 1340 CDT 6/07/2018. Liftmaster reported on 06/07/2018 at 1656 CDT via email that they were aware of the problem and subsequently issued the comment below to explain the problem:
From @liftmaster on Twitter:Valued Customers, We experienced an electrical outage today that affected our myQ servers. We have identified and corrected the root cause and are currently restoring service. For updates, visit Chamberlain Support . Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience.
on 06/08/18 at 0702 CDT they reported via Twitter:
Service has been restored to our myQ servers. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience. Rest assured that at no time during the outage has any data been compromised. Thank you for your patience.
REALLY - an electrical power outage caused this much trouble in restoring service!
During the outage (service was partially restored during the night) alerts and access to MyQ connected devices was not available. This includes Liftmaster and Chamberlain branded MyQ services. Being an IT professional in addition to a garage door service company we find it very odd that these servers were not housed in a top notch data center with multiple power sources including backup generators etc. With the amount of units which have been sold based on the features of MyQ (including the higher price for the garage door openers) the least an average user would expect is that the servers would follow best practices for redundancy and fault tolerance.
If you agree with us please forward your thought to Chamberlain / Liftmaster through their social media pages and perhaps we can provide the impetus for them to disclose and resolve the problem.
The servers for Garage Door Co Repair Pros have been housed in top tier data centers for years with encrypted backups to different providers both on and off site. Whether it be a load balanced server array on Amazon, Google, private servers on Rackspace, Liquidweb etc the options are endless and this kind of outage should result in some significant post mortem analysis by Chamberlain / Liftmaster. We waited to post this to see if any further comment was being supplied to the professional dealer community or on the Liftmaster website or social media. We have not found anything more specific than the twitter posts made from @liftmaster. We know the @liftmaster follows us and hope that this stirs some serious conversations and disclosure of the true problem and the steps that have been taken to prevent the same problem moving forward.
MyQ is the technology from Chamberlain / Liftmaster which allows users to control their garage door from an internet connection or iPhone or Android app. We use the MyQ features regularly and have found that most customers who have upgraded their garage door opener to MyQ (available for Chamberlain/Liftmaster/Craftsman openers mfg after 1998) via the 888lm console and 828lm internet gateway OR by purchasing a new garage door opener find the new features very useful. Visit our wesite here for details and instructions.