Evite fails on the year's biggest party night

Update: It’s past 9pm Pacific time, meaning that it’s now New Year’s Day on the East Coast … and Evite is still down. I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t planned maintenance, or if it is, it went horribly awry.

No one cool uses Evite anymore. You know this. I know this. Auren Hoffman, chief executive of search startup RapLeaf and an investor in competitor Socializr, wrote a column for us two years ago about why he hates Evite. But it’s still the biggest event website around.

Well, we can add another item to Hoffman’s litany of complaints — Evite is down on New Year’s Eve. That’s right, it’s down on the biggest party night of the year, meaning the event details stored on the site are now inaccessible to partygoers. And according to the site, the down time — which only includes “certain pages” (like, um, the main Evite site) — is due to scheduled maintenance. Now, I’m not really sure what’s going on; I’m guessing that Evite is having trouble dealing with traffic, and the “planned maintenance” message is just the default error page.

But maybe we should take Evite at its word, and assume it really did schedule down time. For 6pm Pacific time on New Year’s Eve. Friends, that was a bad idea.

Meanwhile, if you sent out an Evite invitation to a New Year’s party — say, an invitation to the author of this post — I’d suggest resending it via email. Or maybe it’s time to give in and use Facebook Events.

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