AI Website Builder Vzy Down for 2 Days

Not good.

Vzy was one of those lifetime deals I got that was very happy with (here’s my affiliate link, though I don’t know why you’d want to use it after reading this blog!). The site offers an AI website builder. You could put in a topic and Vzy would create a nice business website for you with AI text and AI selected stock images in a jiffy. The interface was pretty decent, and the sites, while somewhat limited in styling, were attractive. Up until about 2 days ago, Vzy was also very stable and reliable.

But on October 28, 2024, some sort of catastrophic outage hit Vzy, leaving users in the dark. All websites were showing a 403 Forbidden error. We didn’t get an email update until a day into the outage. Their main website was down for a day. I had to find their help forum page to see updates. The message they shared a day ago was:

We completely understand your frustration. We are on top of the issue and are actively working to resolve it within the next 12 to 24 hours. We assure you that we will keep you informed every step of the way.

Thank you for your patience as we navigate this situation. If you have any further questions or need assistance in the meantime, feel free to reach out!

I had a number of small sites running on Vzy that are still inaccessible. I can get into the backend. Most of these sites were just promotional sites for SEO purposes and not important. But one of the sites was my instructional design portfolio for an EdX class I’m currently enrolled in, and this means I can’t hand in my homework.

Actually, I’m lucky in that I got sidetracked this weekend and didn’t hand in my homework when I planned to; otherwise, with the peer review, they would have seen the site down and marked me a zero.

I’m currently working to rebuild my instructional design portfolio on another platform.

I will note here that I used to run a web design business and managed a lot of web servers in my day, including helping with system administration for websites of several influencers. A 2 day downtime is not normal. This should have been fixed within hours. The outage is something catastrophic, like a hack, or something stupid, like they got locked out of their webhost for not paying their bills on time, and they are scrambling to find a replacement.

I hope they’ll recover from this, but the extended outage doesn’t look good considering the failure rate of AI startups. Use at your own risk.

UPDATE: Wednesday Evening
Vzy tells us that the problem has been resolved, but we must manually republish our websites in the backend and click the “Publish” button so they come back online. I did and mine works again. Hopefully this was a one-off.