Tin Can Stability Issues; Free Party Line Plan Until Resolved

Hi Tin Can community, 

 

Tl;dr: the Tin Can network has been unstable for some of you since Christmas, and it’s taking us longer to restore it to pre-Christmas levels (100% uptime for 14-months) than we expected. We’re pausing all party line subscription payments until we can get this resolved, and are working tirelessly to stabilize the service. This is not at all the experience you deserve, and we will make it right. 

 

Longer version:

 

This is Chet, Graeme & Max, the co-founders of Tin Can. For the last two weeks we’ve been convinced that each issue we’ve had was resolvable and would return stability to the network. But we’re not there yet, so we wanted to bring you into what’s happening. 

 

We know for the majority of you the experience has been stable since setup, but we want to take ownership of our challenges here and so are sending this to everyone who has a Tin Can.

 

After 14 months of 100% uptime with tens of thousands of devices, things went wonky starting Christmas morning.

 

Despite planning extensively for the holiday surge, some real limitations only revealed themselves once we reached this scale. The new volume has exposed weaknesses in our systems that are affecting reliability for a portion of our community. 

 

Until Christmas Day, Tin Can had never experienced a major outage. While our testing and planning gave us confidence we were ready, the reality of welcoming so many new families at once challenged parts of our infrastructure in ways we didn’t anticipate. 

 

Right now, our team is actively working to resolve an outage that began early yesterday morning. While we’re making progress, we don’t yet have a firm timeline to share for when we’ll have a fix. 

 

We’ll continue to share the latest updates here: https://tincan.kids/pages/status. 

 

Until our systems are consistently stable, we won’t charge anyone for our service.

 

We don’t want to charge you for a service that isn’t working as reliably as it needs to. Until we’re back to a steady state and can confidently say we’re restored, not for a day or two but consistently, the Party Line Plan will be free. 

 

This is personal in every way.

 

We’ll never forget the first 50 deliveries we made. We walked into 50 homes, set up kids around our neighborhood with Tin Cans, and got to witness the magic of their first calls. And then for over a year, we watched these Tin Cans change their lives. 

 

When Chet’s daughter switched schools, Tin Can helped her stay close to old friends during a hard transition. When his son finishes a baseball tournament, his first instinct is to call a grandparent to share every detail. We hear versions of these moments from families everywhere.

 

That’s why every support issue hits home. Behind each ticket is a child who just wants to call a grandparent or a friend.

 

We know the past two weeks have shaken confidence. All we can say is this: there’s nothing but heart behind Tin Can, and we won’t stop until your kids can experience the same magic so many families did before the Christmas surge.

 

With a great deal of humility, 

 

Chet, Graeme, Max and the Tin Can team

 

PS. If you need our support team, you can find them at support@tincan.kids.