Yesterday, data storage service Carbonite urged people to prepare for "World Backup Day" on March 31st, suggesting that customers use its "'set it and forget it' protection" to copy data from their machines. There's just one problem: Carbonite's backup service is currently down. The company has been contacted on Twitter by several users who say they've been having trouble backing up or retrieving files; it has responded that "we're aware of the outage & our engineers are working to resolve the issue." The Carbonite website was also offline for a while, although it recently looks to have started working again.

According to Twitter, the company first acknowledged the issue early yesterday evening. We weren't able to get any specifics on how widespread the outage is, but Carbonite's support line told us that they expected it to be resolved within 24 hours. While we imagine Carbonite isn't exactly happy about the timing here, at least there's still a week left for users to back up in honor of the big day.

Update: Carbonite did not create World Backup Day as this article originally implied; it's an independent initiative founded by Reddit users.

Update 2: Carbonite has issued the following statement:

A small number of our customers are still experiencing difficulty in connecting to our services and site (logging in, mobile access, etc.). Our engineers are making significant progress to restore full access. As we noted before in our updates on Facebook, our customers’ backups are safe and secure and not at all impacted by this matter. As we have further updates, we’ll post them there as well.