Fitbit fixed issues that lasted for hours

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Image: Google / Fitbit

Fitbit’s services were dealing with some issues for hours on Wednesday, but the company mitigated the problems by early Thursday morning, according to an explanation on Fitbit’s status website.

While the issues were going on, people who use Fitbit on its own and Fitbit via a Google account were seeing errors at different rates. But the company hasn’t totally nailed what was going on.

“The root causes of this incident remain under investigation,” Fitbit wrote. “One underlying cause was an unexpected kind of resource exhaustion which caused requests between backend servers to fail and which was mitigated by expanding capacity. Our teams are now working to ensure that the issue will not recur.” (Perhaps an influx of people trying to set up their new Charge 6 or Pixel Watch 2 devices tripped up Fitbit’s systems — you have to migrate Fitbit data to a Google account to be able to use the wearables.)

On Wednesday evening, Fitbit’s support account on X (formerly Twitter) posted about the issues. “We’re aware that some customers are experiencing issues with the Fitbit app and we are currently investigating,” Fitbit wrote. “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, thank you for your patience!”

For a little while, Fitbit’s community page also had a big banner that read: “We’re continuing to investigate the issue affecting Fitbit devices. Thank you for your patience.”

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

There were a bunch of reports in other outlets and on X discussing the outages. Android Authority reported that, in the app, data wasn’t loading and the Coach tab showed a “content not available” message. 9to5Google also wasn’t seeing stats in the app. A Verge reader emailed us to say they hadn’t been able to activate a Charge 6, which is something that you have to do inside the app.

On Downdetector, more than 3,000 people reported problems of some kind. The reports began to spike at about 5PM ET on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s issues follow two major outages in February.

Update October 12th, 5:02PM ET: Fitbit says it has mitigated the outage.