Some Thoughts on the Prolonged MATLAB Outage
After waiting for a long time, the MathWorks official Community has finally resumed some of its functionalitys! Congratulations! Next, I’d like to share some thoughts to help prevent such outages from happening again, as they have affected far too many people.
- Almost all resources rely solely on MathWorks servers. Once a failure (or a ransomware attack) occurs, everything is paralyzed, and there isn’t even a temporary backup server? For a big company like MathWorks to have no contingency plan at all is eye-opening. This tells us that we should have our own temporary emergency servers!
- The impact should be minimized. For example, many users need to connect to the official servers to download various support packages, such as the “Deep Learning Toolbox Converter for ONNX Model Format.” Could these be backed up and mirrored to the “releases” section of a GitHub repository, so users in need can download them.
- A large proportion of users who have already installed MATLAB cannot access the online help documentation. Since R2023a, installing the help documentation locally has become optional. This only increases the burden on the servers？ Moreover, the official website only hosts documentation for the past five years. That means after 2028, if I haven’t installed the local offline documentation, I won’t be able to access the online documentation for R2023a anymore?
Anything else you’d like to add? Feel free to leave a comment.
7 Comments
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Regarding point 3, I typically install the documentation locally immediately after setting up a new MATLAB release. My concern was that I would be without Internet access at some critical junture, but it has proven to be useful during this outge. Local documentation used to be the default, something that changed a few releases ago. Mathworks has their reasons for doinng this, yet here we are now...
The current offline documentation is still not perfect. Truly offline documentation should allow you to open it anytime without launching desktop MATLAB, supporting basic “web-like” operations such as preview and search. For example, I often use the OpenCV library, whose documentation can be downloaded separately and opened for preview anytime.
Good point. I had not realized that the locally installed pages aren't accessible when MATLAB isn't running. Then again, I almost always have it running.
BTW，I found it improvement after this outage repair is that accessing the official documentation online has become faster and more accurate (than before), and I no longer encounter the two issues I faced before:
- The documentation's geographic location problem has been resolved. The system now remembers my custom geographic location when accessing the documentation, instead of forcing me to use the local region every time I reopen the webpage.
- The online documentation no longer frequently experiences redirection issues. It now takes me directly to the destination website without time-consuming and troublesome intermediate redirects.
Note that I did not change any settings in the system browser, nor did I perform any other manual interventions.
My biggest concern is that in this current time of Mathworks being extorted with ransomware, a Mathworks web directory will be hacked and users will be offered new Matlab installer files, which in turn will distribute ransomware to Matlab users' computers. We need Matlab as university professors every day and would probably install a file from Mathworks drives immediately in an emergency, even if the operating system tells us or warns us that it is not from a manufacturer like Apple. For me, Matlab is by far the most important software tool in my profession. I hope the attack is stopped soon and wish the Mathworks team all the best.
I am fortunate to see that MathWorks' various applications are gradually returning to normal, which is a positive sign.
Although I can successfully download the “onnxconverter.mlpkginstall” file from FEX now, the subsequent installation process still requires downloading necessary dependency files from the server. This is just a link header file, not a complete installation package.
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