The "this service is unavailable" message
If you've ever opened 1pm and seen a stark page that reads "This service is unavailable", you're seeing the app mid-update. Not a bug, not an outage, not anything lost from your event. This article explains what the message means, how long it lasts, what to do, and why it shows in the first place.
What the message is
When 1pm pushes an update — a bug fix, a new feature, the kind of release that lands on the live site every few days — there's a brief window where the new version is taking over from the old one. For most of the update, you wouldn't notice it; the deploy runs through a warm-up slot and gets switched in under traffic. But right at the very end of the swap, there's a few-second window where the platform that runs 1pm hasn't quite handed traffic from the old version to the new version, and any request that arrives in that window gets the platform's stock "This service is unavailable" message instead of the app itself.
It's a server-level page, not a 1pm page. That's why it looks different from the rest of the app: no logo, no navigation, no "something went wrong" copy from us. It's the underlying hosting platform's default response when there's no app process to hand the request to.
How long it lasts
Usually around 20 seconds, sometimes less. The page resolves itself the moment the new version of 1pm is fully online — no action needed from you. Refresh the page once after a short pause and you should be on the new version of 1pm immediately.
If the message is still showing more than a minute after you first saw it, something else is going on — that's worth flagging to us. The normal pattern is: see the message, wait 20 seconds, refresh, you're in.
Will I lose anything
No. Three things to be specific about:
Your event data is safe. Updates don't touch the database. Your timeline, crew, events, files, everything you've saved is on a separate storage layer that doesn't restart with the app.
Your crew's live links keep their tokens. The URLs stay the same after the update. A crew member who happens to refresh their live link during the 20-second window sees the same "This service is unavailable" message, then the same run of show as before once they refresh again.
Anything you were halfway through typing is lost only if you hadn't saved it. The app doesn't preserve unsaved form state across a restart. If you were in the middle of editing an event when the update landed and you hit Save during the brief window, the save may bounce — try Save again after refreshing.
What to do if you see it
Wait ten or fifteen seconds, then refresh the page. That's the entire process for the normal case. The new version of 1pm should load straight away and everything continues where it left off.
If you're on a phone with the live link saved to your home screen, the same applies: wait, refresh, you're back in.
If a crew member sees it on their phone during an event, the same applies for them too — refresh after a short pause. Their bookmarked URL is still good.
When updates typically happen
Updates land whenever there's something new to ship — usually a few times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. We don't have a fixed maintenance window; the deploy mechanism is built to swap versions quickly enough that the visible interruption is the 20-second window described above rather than a multi-minute outage that would warrant scheduling.
Updates are deliberately not scheduled to avoid live events as a hard rule, but the visible interruption is small enough that crew on the live link almost never notice. If you're running a high-stakes event and you'd rather we hold any non-urgent updates during a specific window, write to hello@1pm.app with the date and time range and we'll honour it where we can.
Why it shows at all
The honest answer: it's the limitation of the platform 1pm runs on. The hosting environment serves its own default 503 page when there's a brief moment between the old version stopping and the new version taking over. From inside 1pm we can't replace that page with our own branded one — the request never reaches the app for us to handle.
It would be nicer if it said something like "1pm is updating, back in a moment". That's on the list. For now, the message is what the platform serves, and the easiest fix is knowing what it means.
When it's NOT an update
If the message persists for more than a minute or two, or if you see it repeatedly through the day, something else is going on. Possibilities:
A genuine outage at the hosting platform. Rare but possible — Azure's own status pages would show it. Check status.1pm.app or our linked status page from the footer.
A network issue on your end. If other sites are also slow to load, the problem is closer to your connection than to 1pm.
A bug in the latest update that broke something. We monitor for this and roll back if needed, but if you're seeing weird behaviour beyond the brief unavailable window, write to hello@1pm.app with what you saw and we'll dig in.
The normal case — a 20-second window during a routine update — is none of these and resolves on its own.