Anyone else affected by the current Glowforge Print Service “Degraded Performance” outage? For a bit, it seemed we could still get prints through, but now the machine wont even cut the material properly. I don’t consider it a coincidence there is an outage affecting the machines ability to focus or autofocus, and now we can’t cut materials.
I’m frustrated, but Glowforge rarely has outages. Hopefully they get it operational.
Anyone else experiencing this?
I have issues focusing, my machine will not focus at all, it will try for 6 minutes and then time out. I have to use manual focus to get around that but it still takes about 5 minutes to start the process
Us too. You aren’t alone. Glowforge has emailed us, but they are being slow. They are probably working hard on this.
On ours, I don’t think it is Focusing to a point our material is not cutting all of they way. Careful if your materials are expensive.
We were experiencing this earlier today. Hopefully it gets better soon. I have a huge order due Friday 
I’m getting stuck on Focusing too. (Scanning is fine. “Set Focus” hangs after the print head positions itself on the focus point.)
I am getting stuck on focus as well and when it decides to work it’s not cutting through my material at all .This is the longest outage I have experienced since having my machine. This is unacceptable especially for those of us who run small businesses.
I have managed to cut through my material since the outage problem but I am having problems doing an outline around a shape - it gives me two lines either side and then freezes when I try to adjust the copy. I think I am going to call it a day until it is sorted.
I’m having the same issues…stuck on focusing forever and IF it lets me print the engraving is wonky and doesn’t cut through my material. SUPER frustrating for us small business owners who have order due.
If you understand how Glowforge works, it’s hard to imagine how a cloud outage could affect the machine’s ability to cut through or otherwise impact print quality, at least without resorting to rather elaborate and improbable hypothesis.
The cloud service processes your artwork and turns it into instructions that tell the machine how to drive its motors, turn on and off the laser, etc. It downloads those instructions and then runs them locally. When there’s an outage, that conversion process gets slower or doesn’t work, but the actual output of that process isn’t any different. Once your file gets through, it will run the machine in exactly the same way at exactly the same power levels as it would any other day.
I think what is happening here is properly termed a coincidence.
I
m also stuck on the focus stage. It takes a little over 5 minutes to finally be ready. The other bad part is that it seems to also be cutting poorly when it finally does cut. Hope this gets resolved soon.
Lots of potential things - the Google cloud farm that some of the GF servers are on are degraded. That degradation could be reduced physical server resources available to the VMs. That could cause wonky behavior in the code execution if the physical servers are tapping out. GF’s code could be thinking it’s successful and attempts the download and then either runs into problems (& uncaught errors) or drops a corrupted motion plan on the box.
The fact that they didn’t know there was an issue until it was reported supports the hypothesis that their error detection instrumentation isn’t all that great (we’ve seen multiple instances of “all is well” on the status pages that suddenly get switched to problem status when the reports here reach a crescendo).
Of course there’s the possibility that the Google server code or control programming is bad. They haven’t had a great past few weeks with Chrome exploits. It’s not inconceivable that other code in their portfolio might also have issues reflective of their overall corporate coding, testing and control practices.
The fact that we’re days into this without a solution suggests it’s not a straightforward issue with either the Google or GF code. Those are the two commonalities across all of the issue reports so it’s more likely than not the problem resides there and not in the machines or designs.
GF’s advice to “try again” and it might work is more hope than plan. They claim to be working around the clock with Google but we’ll never know on what or why this is occurring. Thank goodness for all the people willing to waste materials trying again so it stays on the radar and potentially provides more troubleshooting data.
Yes, thank you for illustrating “elaborate and improbable hypothesis”.
I worked in commercial virtualization space for many years, from its infancy. The error detection is very basic, due to the diverse nature of customer applications they support - and the need to permit those customers to update/change them at any time.
Essentially it’s just like seeing if the lights are still on, not validating the integrity of the code. Like seeing if your screen lights up when you turn on the computer. I’m over-simplifying, but it’s very limited…
Google Cloud has reported the incident as resolved, and we can confirm that print times are returning to normal. We will continue to monitor for any additional problems, but you can use your printer normally.
Hey Everyone! Just wanted to provide an update as the OP. Once the Cloud issues were resolved, our machine is 100% operational. This includes Focus, Autofocus, and all material cuts.
IMO, the cloud issue was 100% to blame here, as again, our machine is now perfect.
If you are curious about what we do, and how it may have been affected here, check us out at https://www.bwc-hc.com/
I think that’s spelled “Crowdstrike” right?
I suppose Google’s data center & server management could have some sort of magic that prevents software errors or hardware failures. 
I hate to be saying this but… why is my glowforge showing me that my design no longer fits on the same size material as it did when I printed it out before the outage. I kept the same positions etc so I could be sure to access it and print it? Any ideas?
The work area changes with the speed. The faster the speed, the smaller the work area.
As @deirdrebeth mentioned speed affects the area available for a design. That’s because the head needs more room to speed up & slow down. The faster the engrave, the smaller the area you can use. The slower the engrave, the larger the area. It could be that between the time you last did it that you changed the speed (picking a different material or preset can do this)