Coffee Meets Bagel: Dating app users rue missed connections amid outage

Users of the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel have expressed frustration over an ongoing, multi-day system outage.

The app - which sells itself as "the dating app for serious daters" - first went down on 27 August, blocking users from their budding romances.

It has now been down for three days with firm engineers saying they are working on a "system outage".

The app claims to have more than 10 million sign-ups worldwide, including many across Asia.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm's entire online domain is also down, with its website displaying a 503 Service error.

In a company update on Tuesday night local time, the firm said: "We're making solid progress, and we're on track to get things back up and running."

"We'll send you both an email and a push notification once things are fixed."

But frustrated users are venting their concerns. This has led to speculation online of a ransomware attack, data compromises as well as jokes about employee sabotage.

On the Reddit forum r/CoffeeMeetsBagel, users expressed worries about missed connections, expiring messages and concerns their matches - known on the app as "bagels"- might think they're being ignored.

One user wrote: "I meet a girl on this app and she said we could have a date. We haven't arranged and then the server went down."

Another user said he and his date had only communicated through the app and had been in the middle of planning a second date when it went down. He says he then resorted to searching for his match on Google, and "finally" found her LinkedIn profile and messaged her there. "I felt like a creep," he wrote.

"This is affecting many people's ability to connect with people they've begun to develop relationships with," one top-liked comment read.

"RIP to the poor souls who scheduled dates yesterday and couldn't coordinate, who had meaningful conversations going and lost them."

Much of the criticism has centred around the company's lack of information about the system failure. "The status update isn't really sufficient. Can you please let us know if this outage is expected to last hours, or days more?" one user wrote.

"I really hope it's not a hack," another said. "I provided a copy of my passport when they asked for verification. Stupid, stupid, stupid."

Others said they would be deleting the app - "Back to Hinge and Bumble," one user wrote.

Coffee Meets Bagel was founded in San Francisco in 2011 by three sisters, Arum Kang, Dawoon Kang and Soo Kang. The app tries to distinguish itself from other dating apps through "curated" matches and in-depth profiles. It claims 90% of its users use the app with the intention of finding a long-term relationship.