🛠️ Moving to Tokyo: Brief Downtime Scheduled for Nov 8 | 11.7

Hey Pickful community,

We’re moving Pickful’s servers from Europe to Tokyo. The site will be offline for a little while during the move, so here’s a heads-up.

🕗 When

• Maintenance window: Nov 8, 00:00–03:00 UTC (Nov 7, 7–10 PM US Eastern; 4–7 PM US Pacific; Nov 8, 8–11 AM Beijing)
• Actual downtime: about 1 hour, starting at 00:00 UTC. We’ll be back as soon as we’re done.

The 3 hours is a safety margin, not how long we expect to be down.

🚀 Why it gets faster

When you open Pickful, you first reach the nearest Cloudflare edge. Images and other static files come straight from there, so they’re already fast and stay that way.

But your feed, logged-in pages, posting and comments all have to go from that edge back to our server. With the server in Europe, that trip crosses half the planet. In Tokyo it’s much shorter, so all of these get faster.

🔄 How the move works

The web app and job runner are set up in Tokyo ahead of time, on the same version, with no impact on you. Images and other files already live in Cloudflare R2, so they don’t move. Only the database needs downtime: we pause the site and stop all writes so the copy we move is complete and no longer changing, send the whole database to Tokyo compressed, restore it, then start the web app and jobs. Finally Cloudflare is switched to talk to Tokyo. The old server in Europe stays around for 1–2 weeks, so we can switch back at any time if something goes wrong.

📋 What to expect

• No data loss. Posts, comments, points and messages all move over intact.
• During the downtime you’ll see a “Down for maintenance, back soon” page, not an error. Nothing to do on your side; everything works again once we’re back.
• Scheduled tasks pause: scheduled posts, syncing to X, bounty payouts, X message sync and the like pick up where they left off once we’re back. Nothing is lost.
• API and MCP publishing, AI agent calls and external callbacks will fail during the downtime. Please don’t schedule publishing for that window, or retry once we’re back.
• For a few minutes after we’re back, a page may show a certificate error. Just refresh.

💬 To the community

Thanks for your patience while we move house. If anything looks off afterwards, tell us and we’ll fix it.

No app update needed. Web, iOS and Android all work as normal once we’re back.

Pickful Team
11.7