Zillow’s website and mobile apps were intermittently down for a few hours today, and it’s still not clear why. The site is back up now.
Zillow began responding to questions about the outage at approximately 10 a.m. Eastern time on its Facebook page.
Zillow Group spokeswoman Katie Curnutte confirmed that Zillow’s site and mobile apps experienced issues for a few hours today related to an internal issue, but she declined to provide more details.
A cyberattack crippled realtor.com and other sites operated by Zillow’s chief rival, Move Inc., for several days last June, but the hitch in Zillow’s site and mobile apps was not hacker-related.
While zillow.com was down, visitors to the site saw a short note: “Our hammers are out; Fixing important details; Adding shim for trim.” Trulia.com, Zillow Group’s other huge brand, appeared to be unaffected by whatever affected Zillow’s site.
Notice posted on Zillow’s website today during its outage.
The company had not reached out to the agents who pay to show up as advertisers on the site during its four-hour hiccup this morning, Curnutte confirmed.
Robert Boler, an agent with RealtyPath in Ogden, Utah, advertises on Zillow and expressed frustration that he was missing possible leads from Zillow as part of the outage.
He also was upset that he hadn’t heard from Zillow about the outage and that his efforts to reach his account representative or someone else at Zillow were unsuccessful.
Zillow sells advertising based on the number of “impressions” it gives agents in a certain ZIP code, so agents who advertise with the firm may not be losing ad dollars as a result of the site’s issues today.
It’s always a busy day at Zillow Group, but the website troubles happened to hit on the day that Zillow Group execs and other members of the company hosted Secretary of U.S. Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro at its headquarters.
Not often someone like @SecretaryCastro just pops into a meeting. pic.twitter.com/YZI8OagE2j
— Jay Thompson (@TheJayT) April 21, 2015
Inman’s deputy editor, Andrea Brambila, contributed reporting for this story.
This story has been updated.
