Zhihu is down: computers and mobile phones can’t be used! Latest situation~~

On the morning of October 17, Zhihu experienced a platform-wide service failure, and the core functions of the web page and the App were out of sync. This is the latest situation that can be confirmed so far. Judging from user feedback, the web page will continue to fail to load when accessing the official website, and many people encounter "502 Bad Gateway" or "ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED" error messages; on the mobile side, the App can start normally and display homepage recommendations, but when clicking on the details page such as Q&A, articles, novels, etc., either a blank page or a "loading failure" prompt will pop up. Some users are repeatedly logged out, and the account is forced to display the anonymous status of "Zhihu User". Problems with the mini program and The app is basically the same, and the core content sections cannot be used normally.

This failure covered many places across the country, and it happened to coincide with the morning rush hour. Whether it was students who were "eight in the morning" or working professionals at work, they all encountered interruptions in use. Some people even joked that "the fishing tool failed." In particular, paid members, especially salt-selected members, reported that their rights and interests could not be realized, and some people fell into "update anxiety" because the update update was interrupted. In response to this failure, Zhihu customer service has confirmed to the media that there is a bug in the system. It has been handed over to engineers for emergency repair, but the specific cause and estimated recovery time have not been disclosed yet. It is worth noting that the characteristics of this crash are very similar to the two outages on July 23 and August 15, 2025, both of which were core data interface abnormalities. Some technical analysts speculate that it may be the concentrated access to popular content and novel sections that caused a traffic peak, which also exposed the platform's long-term shortcomings in distributed disaster recovery deployment.

From a technical perspective, there are two possible reasons: First, Zhihu has long relied on centralized server clusters, lacks off-site backup and multi-availability zone deployment, and is prone to response failures when concurrency is high; second, there are underlying database stability issues, similar to the failure of the comment area in August 2021, which may become an inducement again this time. If the user encounters access problems, there is no need to rush to uninstall and reinstall the application or frequently switch networks. It is more efficient to first search "Zhihu is broken" through Weibo, or visit the Zhihu system status page to confirm whether it is a platform-level failure. If there is a temporary need, you can also use vertical communities such as Stack Overflow, or get such knowledge-based apps instead.

As of press time at 11:00 on October 17, Zhihu has not released a formal explanation or apology statement through official Weibo, in-app announcements and other channels. Users can pay more attention to these platforms for repair progress. However, this failure may further weaken users’ trust in the stability of Zhihu’s services. Referring to the case of account aliasing caused by a third-party firewall failure in January 2024, paying users may later make demands for compensation such as extending the membership validity period. Moreover, Zhihu has experienced at least five public outages in the past five years, and the urgency of technological upgrades has become increasingly obvious. Some insiders suggest that the platform must accelerate the transformation of distributed systems and improve the disaster recovery mechanism to cope with the impact of high-frequency traffic. It is recommended that users wait patiently for official fixes and pay attention to whether there are any abnormalities in their equipment or network environment. If the fault persists for more than 24 hours, they can submit feedback through Zhihu customer service or the Black Cat complaint platform.

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