DreamsTime Nightmare: Website Goes Down, Users Left in the Dark!

DreamsTime users were left in the dark this morning when the website experienced an unannounced outage at 8:42 AM Pacific Time. With no warning prior to the outage, users of the website were left wondering what was going on. One user on Reddit, @SweetAccording7679, wrote: "I went to the Dreamstime site this morning but got an error that service temporarily unavailable. Does anyone know what’s going on? Is this normal? I pay for their content and I need a graphic for something I’m working on today. Wondering how long it’ll be down for."DreamsTime users were left in the dark this morning when the website experienced an unannounced outage at 8:42 AM Pacific Time. With no warning prior to the outage, users of the website were left wondering what was going on. One user on Reddit, @SweetAccording7679, wrote: "I went to the Dreamstime site this morning but got an error that service temporarily unavailable. Does anyone know what’s going on? Is this normal? I pay for their content and I need a graphic for something I’m working on today. Wondering how long it’ll be down for."

DreamsTime is an online royalty-free microstock provider based in Brentwood, Tennessee. It was started in 2000 as a website selling royalty-free images and was redesigned as a “community enabled” microstock provider in 2004, entering the market after its rivals iStock and Shutterstock. According to Nashville Business Journal, the company had sales approaching $10 million on the year 2007 with revenue growing expected to grow to $15 million in 2008. DreamsTime's imagery is targeted for individuals, private sector and Fortune 500 companies.

DreamsTime is headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, USA, and is currently the world's largest stock community with 46 million users. The company accepts anyone as a contributor and relies on them to grow their file database. Images are licensed as royalty free, meaning one license has unlimited uses, and the prices of the licenses images vary from $0.20 to thousands of dollars, of which the contributor receives a percentage.

For those DreamsTime paid users who are negatively impacted by this outage, another Reddit user @libcrypto suggests, "Yeah, looks down to me. When it comes back up, add up the down time and send them an email asking for a (down time)/(month time) refund for the month."

As of 1/31/2023, DreamsTime had 18,000,000 registered members, more than 300,000 contributing photographers and over 64,000,000 photos, illustrations, cliparts and vectors and unique visitors exceeding 11,000,000 monthly. The cause of the outage is still unknown, and DreamsTime users will have to wait to see if their losses can be recovered. It remains to be seen how long the outage will last, leaving DreamsTime users in the dark until the website is back up, and hopefully the cause of the outage can be identified and fixed so that this doesn't happen again. Nobody likes when the lights go out and the party ends, except for maybe Hunter S. Thompson, who would revel in the chaos and confusion of a DreamsTime outage.