Yelpocaplyse Resolved: Yelp Returns After 3-Hour Lunch Break

Yelp may be down for some of you right now. We’re experiencing networking issues, but working to get back up to speed ASAP.

— Yelp (@Yelp) May 16, 2014

Just as thousands of people in the Eastern time zone started casting about for a place to eat lunch today, Yelp suffered an outage.

The site appears to have gone down a bit after noon. As you can see in the embedded Tweet above, the site’s Twitter account reported that it’s experiencing networking issues.

The downtime comes during the same week that Yelp announced it was offering a free reservation service. While you are waiting for the service to come back online, you can read Greg Sterling’s analysis of the move here.

We’ll update if we learn more about the outage.

H/T to Mat Honan, who was one of the first to post about the Yelpocalypse, with this one-star review.

Postscript: Yelp started coming back online in the 3 p.m. Eastern hour and now appears fully functional on the desktop and mobile apps with the “yelp” search in Twitter now full of check-ins and business reviews, instead of complaints about the downtime. Confirmation came at 3:54 p.m. when @Yelp tweeted: “And we’re back! We’ve addressed the issue and are working to restore full functionality. Thanks for hanging in there!”

Earlier, people had naturally used Twitter to commiserate and poke fun:

OMG! Yelp is down! How will I find a mediocre overpriced lunch place today?!?

— Andy Milder (@AndyMilder) May 16, 2014

@Yelp noooo. I need dinner recommendations….

— Steph Hardiman Simon (@_StephSimon) May 16, 2014

YELP IS DOWN (2 1/2 stars)

— Lavis Tarchuk (@larchuk) May 16, 2014

Ugh! @Yelp, why must you be down right now? #badtiming

— Merri H (@MissMerrii) May 16, 2014

The moment you realize you rely on @Yelp for all your #NYC food recommendations. Hope #Yelp is fixed soon!

— Austin Graff (@TheTatar) May 16, 2014

Was gonna slam a place on #Yelp, but lucky for them the site is down.

— Felix Barajas® (@fjbar75) May 16, 2014

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