Well, in a way, we kind of did get a warning… 
lots of new machines are going out.
One thing to patiently consider is that Glowforge also needs to gradually scale up their cloud infrastructure as they produce a new batch of machines. There’s usually a bunch of backend stuff they need to do in order to do that.
Long and the short of it is… I’m sure it’s only a slight hiccup that will be sorted out in a day or so.
Only after people started posting. How much time did people waste thinking it was on their end and trying to resolve it? With an auto-responder handling initial support emails, this is the only way to find out if it’s systemic. Unfortunately that means we all have to ask every time and most of those will not be systemic but something we’re doing. Or we wait until we’ve exhausted all attempts to fix it ourselves and then ask if everyone else is having issues. That wastes hundreds and soon to be tens of thousands of hours of customer/user time.
All because there’s nowhere that GF will post a “updating things, please standby” message. It’s a crummy user experience and is going to burn them in spades the first time it happens after most of the machines have been delivered.
It’d be a good thing for them to take out of the hopper (it’s been reported & suggested & asked for before) and delivered in the GFUI so they head the issue off before there are 10,000 people emailing support all within a few minutes of each other. It’s the type of self-inflicted damage they can prevent.
It’s not excusable, for sure. They really do need a https://app.glowforge.com/status page.
@dan Hopper?
Don’t disagree that an online indication of server status, updates, etc. is needed. But not sure anyone has any idea that an update is the cause or that GF was even aware of problems. So far it is anecdotal. But I agree a notification will be needed for those types of events.
I guess it is possible that several (many?) folks had the same problem at the same time that got resolved by them not doing anything but wait for the clock to move forward. Or maybe it was the collective turning machines on & off, calibrating, recalibrating and re-rendering of a bunch of machines & jobs that caused or solved the issue.
What if the Glowforge Cloud doesn’t really exist, that it’s really each n-1 person’s Glowforge that’s doing background processing for each other’s user? YOU FOOLS! You destroyed us all!
No I was just suggesting that it may not be a firmware update. It might be something in the operation of the servers, networks or other code that GF wasn’t aware was causing a problem until checking Problems and Support. They are West Coast and the problems may not have been affecting them in their office. For example just yesterday a couple folks started talking about similar problems with a firmware update and Dan said there was no update. We don’t really disagree because yes there needs to be some sort of useful notice and status site for real updates.
BTW: I have zero psychological need for anyone to agree with me. It does drive me Bat Sh!t crazy when someone doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say, so I keep trying to explain over and over. But I’m cool with being wrong.
When I turned my machine on today it got halfway through calibration, and then it just sat there. GFUI said “calibrating”. I turned it off after a little while (15 minutes?), waited 30 seconds, and turned it back on. Nothing happened, GFUI said “not connected”. So I turned it off again, waited 5 minutes, and turned it back on. It started to calibrate, and then the button turned orange (first color change since setup, woohoo!) but then turned off again within a few seconds. GFUI said “Something went wrong with calibration, try turning the GF off and on again” so I did that. Fired up normally, calibrated, started working again.
I have a (paying) job right now engraving a hinged baseplate assembly (anodized aluminum). I had a similar but older assembly to do tests on, and thought that I had gotten the settings dialed it, but the anodization on the new one is just a little different. I have been running the job multiple times, to try and sneak up on the right look, without overdoing it. I have not seen any alignment shifts, but I have not been opening the lid. If it shifted all of a sudden, the piece would be ruined, and I would have to pay my client for it instead of him paying me… and the assembly by itself costs just a bit more than what I am charging for the job.
Without an acknowledgement from glowforge it may very well be a different issue than an update.
I can’t like that because then it would seem like I care if you agree. 
Heheh. 
I have known you long enough here to know Spock couldn’t give a shi*. if he wanted to.
Muted emotions. Not totally Spock. Got embarrassed by another band member on stage a few days ago. Didn’t like the emotions at all. A little worried about the onset of Pon farr.
What’s a Pon farr?
A male Vulcan in heat.
Google.
SO glad I asked! 
We don’t need rpegg going nuclear on us.
Yeah I’m with you on that. I don’t they push out many firmware updates. I’m betting that more often it’s a web or app server issue - either things locking up or a software update (which I put as a low probability because basic production operations management would make that happen at the least disruptive time like 2am Sundays). Quite probably a software issue with the servicing of requests from GF machines.
Daaaaaang, I haven’t seen Jolene Blalock in a while…
Could be. Y’all would have a much better idea of the probabilities. Networks and servers are definitely not my field.