Dropbox and Uber: Worth Billions, But Still Inches From Disaster

Dropbox went dark over the weekend.

According to the company, the widespread outage was the result of a bug it introduced while updating the hundreds of computer servers that drive its massively popular file-sharing service. But the problem was bigger than that. The San Francisco-based startup not only faced countless complaints from users across the net, it was forced to deflect rumors that the service was hacked, something that turned out to be a hoax.

On one level, a dust-up like this is just part of life as a startup. Things go wrong, people get upset, problems are solved, lessons are learned. But the stakes are higher when you’re Dropbox — or any other tech startup that has ascended to the misty heights of the billion-dollar club. This weekend’s Dropbox outage, along with recent problems for Uber and Snapchat, show just how close such companies skate to complete disaster — not because of anything they necessarily did wrong, but because of the very nature of their businesses.

In those tender days between two-scrappy-founders-in-an-apartment and established business, these burgeoning outfits have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in their future, and that future is far from certain. In an age when people can so easily abandon one web service for another, a single screw-up is all it can take to bring things crashing down for good. And the best of these companies know it.