Duolingo Technical Issues
As you may have noticed, we (Duolingo and Duolingo for Schools) are experiencing some technical issues today, Jan. 10th, and something similar to this happened yesterday as well.
Please keep that in mind when planning for your teaching day and your students' homework. We are working on making everything tip-top as quickly as we can, but I recommend getting your streaks and achieving your daily goals sooner rather than later.
We will update this thread when all seems back to normal, so please subscribe to it on the top right. Follow this forum and Duolingo on Twitter to receive updates @duolingo Thanks for your patience!
Update 1: Things seem stable as of late last night. We are still monitoring and working on slowly fixing issues this may have caused. Thanks for being cool.
Update 2: This is a post from Luis about the issue.
67 Comments
I have more XP than my daily goal, but don't see the completion mark on my streak (80 days). I also bought the Streak Freeze. I hope the streak isn't reset tomorrow...
373
Couldn't you have made some kind of notification in the app stating that we are wasting our time using it today?
Don't you think fixing the problem is a better use of their time than setting up a notification in the app?
- 373
Are you assuming that this was the first time that there have been issues? Or that this is going to be the last time? Plus they already have a notification system set up. During the holidays I was getting them towards the end of the day informing me that I need to get the XP or I will lose my streak.
- 1009
The reminders to do your daily practice are something you can toggle yourself in your settings. I doubt it is a channel by which they could communicate anything else.
- 373
The servers were busy with people trying the get their earned XP to stick.
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And the fixed text could also be "we are experiencing technical difficulties".
- 1009
I suppose you've never done much programming yourself, have you?
Maybe they have a way to mail to all users at the same time, maybe they don't. But the bit of code that triggers the reminders is not a good place to implement this. If they have such a possibility then using it is probably still a bad idea as this would keep their servers busy - which was the problem in the first place.
But I think it would be a good idea to put a "sticky" note on the "Trouble shooting" discussion forum as this would be the first place to look for information if DL is not behaving as expected.
- 373
So the logical thing to do is to tell people that there is a problem, so that they will stop trying to get their XP.
Sending out an email to every single Duolingo user would put quite a big demand on the servers. Since the problem was that the servers were overloaded, sending out that email probably wouldn't have worked, or at least not fully, and it would have made the problem worse.
What would have helped is if they changed the front page on duolingo.com to be a note about the problem. I would put this note over the log in, requiring people to close the note before they could log in. This would be something the webhost does on the fly, but it is very effective and would stop people from logging in to "fix" their xp.
well, if it's working, you're learning. i know losing a streak sucks, yet you're there for learning, not for collecting score points, duh?
I completed my goal for the day but my streak wasn't updated. Will I lose everything? I feel like Duolingo has to give us all a pass. It's not our fault they're experiencing technical issues.
You all know this is a free service, right? Duolingo have the most to lose so I suspect they are working on the problem around the clock until it's fixed.
It's a free service in the same way that facebook is free: if you're not the customer then you're the product. (Though I've yet to figure out quite how they're monetizing my pathetic attempts to learn German!)
Absolutely right. Their business model is explained here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-business-model-of-Duolingo
Thanks Justin. That makes sense. I guess they're not making any money out of me mangling away then.
That's the former business model. They abandoned the translations as a way of earning money ages ago. They're investigating alternative income streams at the moment, e.g. the Test Centre, streak repair, and adverts.
...and we're not the product. Facebook knows about our interests, preferences, and browsing habits, and sells that information to advertisers. Duolingo has no such useful information about us.
I posted a discussion like this yesterday, but I guess it was better if you did it.
Here's the discussion if you want to see it: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/20178601
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I don't see the completion mark on my day streak after doing my daily exercises and translation practice. Regards.
- 1525
I completed 2 lessons on the Android app, but they didn't register despite taking ages. Couldn't get the website on my PC to work at first so I bought a streak freeze on the PC. Now, after completing about 6 lessons on the PC, it has finally agreed that I've reached my goal of 30XP, but it still says my streak is 649 and not 650. Is this to do with the streak freeze? I've never used one before.
Thanks to this error I just lost my 200 streak.....I hope they can better fix this.
Updated again, please check out Luis' post about that https://www.duolingo.com/comment/20203474
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5 streaks? Where do you see 5 streaks? I only ever see one regardless which language I learn.
I can add to that points are also going missing. I've done about six timed tests scoring ~ 18 a piece. Total points for the day 39.
I thought I was going crazy today and yesterday. At least it says I've made my goal, I hope this gets fixed soon!
One side-affect is that experience is not gained for doing the lessons. Well, at least I know I did them. :P
am i the only one that saw a glitch in the lingot store on mobile where there were a bunch of clothing items that you could buy and the names of the clothing items were in the language that you're currently doing? are we going to be able to buy individual clothing items for duo??
I have seen this too. A few times when launching iPhone app in the past and I would switch to the store I would see the clothing, but then the screen would quickly refresh to display the regular list of items. It might be something they are working on...
My streak freeze saved my streak, and the website works great again today. And the post linked above states that everyones streak will be saved. This discussion shows me how powerful the learning system of Duolingo with the streak is and I must say that I am very impressed what the long streaks I see in this discussion.
I think that the issues are also affecting XP and achievements, not counting the earning of XP. Hopefully you have a streak freeze or have already done the XP for the day, otherwise you might lose your streak if the technical issue isn't corrected by the end of the day. :(
When I strengthen a skill, it is strengthened but doesn't give me XP.
I think that the issues are also affecting XP and achievements. Hopefully you have a streak freeze or have already done the XP for the day, otherwise you might lose your streak if the technical issue isn't corrected by the end of the day. :(
Are there still issues? I have assignments that are still showing "not started" and yet my students have worked on them the last few days.
Will classroom reports be sent this week for last week still? Usually I receive them on Monday's...just wondering if I need to manually go through my class lists to assign credit. Thanks!
I am still experiencing issues with my students not being able to see the assignments I send to them.
Try adding yourself as a student on a fresh account, and then assign assignments to "yourself-student" to see if you see those. I have the assignments go to the student's email. In my case, I am unschooling myself, but because I love education, I joined as an educator to see how it all worked. I also wanted to see if it would work at all for my sister and her nephew. She homeschools.
I would then send the information to the official Technical Help to see if they can get this cleared up faster for you. Best Wishes!
no they are not--I cant progress in the program after spending many hours completing all the prerequisite stages
Auxilio!! I am stuck with a Cyrillic type in everything and cannot READ my dashboard to get back to western alphabet!!!
Help please. I worked on your excellent French programme yesterday and now I cannot get it to-day! Merci beaucoup!
What is the problem you are seeing? Everything should be working today as far as we know. This original thread is from about 5 months ago.
Today I have reached my daily goal at 23:51 but Duo says that my streak (519 days) is lost. Is it fairly?!
