Barnes and Noble is experiencing an outage on their Nook e-readers and the Nook apps for Android and iOS. The Nook libraries are not syncing or loading purchases, which means you cannot read ebooks, view your purchases or make new purchases. Wish lists are totally deleted. The entire Nook system has crashed and it won’t be fixed for a couple of days, perhaps longer.
Barnes and Noble technical support has confirmed with Good e-Reader that the servers are down for maintenance, but they never disclosed the downtime in advance to Nook owners. They have not issued any type of update on social media or the B&N website. The inability to sync purchases is a kick in the pants for anyone that was hoping to read a good ebook this long weekend.
Update: Various Barnes and Noble Store managers have contacted me and stated that there is a virus in their networks. It intitially came down from the corporate and filtered down to the stores and also affected the Nook. Cash registers, in physical bookstores are attached to the same network, so no orders can be placed or processed. Barnes and Noble stated that the problem would be sorted on Sunday, but that is looking unlikely.
Update 2: Monday, October 12th. Everything is still down, no ETA on when it will be back up.
Update 3 – Barnes and Noble has officially released a statement and have sent emails to most users and also posted it on their Facebook Page. It states “We sincerely apologize for the present disruption to your NOOK service. We are experiencing an interruption to our system that has caused us to restore our server backups. Unfortunately, while this is underway, NOOK customers are unable to access the library held on these servers. The system will be restored as soon as possible, at which time your library will be made available again. You will be receiving a reward to use online or in our stores as soon as the service is back to normal. We sincerely regret any inconvenience this has caused you.”
Update 4: October 14th – Apparently B&N is starting to mitigate the damage and cash registers in the retail stores are working again. Nook is going to be their last priority, they said within a few days everything will be back to normal. Some people in the comment section said some of their Nook accounts have been compromised and their credit cards are being used by third parties. The Nook Cloud continues to be down, you can’t sync or access it on the Nook e-reader or the Nook apps, so you can’t see any of the purchases you might have made in the past week.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
