[German]Today (March 23, and 24, 2020) we have had some service disruption with remote software Teamviewer. Maybe a technical issue at the server infrastructure due to a heavy load with home office use during Corona crisis. Or a consequence of the suspended check for commercial use for free Teamviewer editions?
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Teamviewer is a software that allows you to access a Teamviewer client from a computer via the Internet using remote sessions and perform remote maintenance there.
Teamviewer Service disruption
The days I had published a German blog post Home-Office-Hilfen in Zeiten der Corona-Krise, to give people, who suddenly have work remotely from home office, a first assistance with existing solutions. Yesterday blog reader LotharV left a comment to this article, asking, whether Teamviewer was having issues.
Is it possible that Teamviewer has been a service disruption since this afternoon? I get the following message on three different systems, also with three different internet accesses, which also work without problems:
Not ready. Please check your internet connection
Today at noon, the situation seems to have worsened. Because I received a mail with the question: I try to set up several team viewer sessions since 11:00 am without success. And German blog reader Henry Barson writes in this comment:
Okay, first of all our personalized QuickSupport modules failed (didn't get a connection/ID anymore) and now we can't get online with TV anymore, seems to be overloaded by the free-bies.
On the Teamviewer status page we are currently (March 24, 2020) reporting issues since 10:57 a.m. CET.
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Monitoring – A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
Mar 24, 12:09 CETUpdate – We are continuing to investigate this issue. IoT online console impacted as well.
Mar 24, 11:38 CETUpdate – We are continuing to investigate this issue.
Mar 24, 11:29 CETInvestigating – A subset of our users are currently experiencing a connectivity issue when accessing our services. Our engineers have not yet confirmed the underlying root cause and they are working on the identification. We will update our status page with new information as soon as possible.
New connections are affected. Existing connections are not affected.
Mar 24, 10:57 CET
First feedback from my German readers indicates, that the announced fix from Teamviewer solved the service disruption.
At present no more check for private use
The Teamviewer software can be used both commercially and privately. While commercial use requires a license, private use of this remote maintenance software is free of charge. In the blog post Teamviewer reports wrongly commercial use I had already pointed out some time ago that Teamviewer sometimes blocks users because of alleged commercial use.
In my comment here I had referred to an article on The Register. They had contacted the Teamviewer people and addressed the situation of incorrect commercial use. Reading the article quickly, I pointed out that unlocking a free account that was mistakenly used for commercial purposes should be faster. Quote:
The Register spoke to TeamViewer and was told by a spokesperson that the company had managed to get response times for the majority of tickets down to one or two days (which will come as a delight to those wailing in its forums).
However, in view of the Corona crisis, the company has decided to temporarily suspend the examination for commercial use in the free licenses. Quote:
"We have stopped checking connections for commercial use in heavily affected regions like China and Italy already some weeks ago and are currently implementing that for lots of other affected countries including UK."
This will probably happen gradually for other countries. The Teamviewer people are quoted as saying We first wanted to make sure that our infrastructure was developed enough to keep up with the increased load, until at the same time we allow many more free connections. Perhaps this step and the increased network traffic on the Teamviewer servers can explain the above disruptions – I'm not sure. We will see in the coming days.
Similar articles:
Cyber attack on TeamViewer in 2016, Chinese suspected
TeamViewer: Vulnerability allows permission changes
Teamviewer reports wrongly commercial use
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