The Castro podcast app is back after it and its associated website went down on Friday. The Castro account on X (formerly Twitter), which had been silent all weekend, wrote in a Monday morning update that it was having DNS issues and had been “working over the weekend to fix it.” By that evening, it had deployed one.
“The issue has now been resolved, and the fix is deployed,” Aditya Ponugonti, a representative from Tiny, the company that owns Castro, told The Verge in an email, “As stated in our last blog, we are still working towards finding a new home for Castro.” Ponugonti added that Castro will announce if that plan changes, and “wind down the services appropriately.”
When an X user asked why Castro didn’t say anything about the problem before Monday, the team answered that it “had to work on an alternate approach as the DNS records were deleted,” and it was “monitoring the DNS propagation before confirming a fix and updating you all accordingly.”
The outage occurred after the team behind Castro denied rumors that the app was shutting down. Users had started reporting on Friday that they were unable to download new episodes or access Castro’s website. When The Verge reached out to the contacts that were listed on Castro’s site, all of our emails were returned as undeliverable because the domain could not be found.
A Friday Reddit post is full of replies from people unable to use significant parts of the app, and recent reviews from its listing on the iOS App Store tell the same story. When we downloaded the app to verify, we were unable to connect to Castro’s servers to find shows to listen to.
The app has been visibly on the ropes since at least November when the app was down for a few days because of a database problem that turned out to be more complicated than the team first expected. That same month, some outlets and blogs reported that Castro’s shutdown was imminent, but Castro managed to get its service back up and running.
Shortly after that, the team posted on X (formerly Twitter) that any communications pertaining to its imminent demise were “unofficial.” The post linked to a December 1st blog entry that denied reports that Castro was shutting down, but admitted the company is “seeking a new home for Castro with new owners” after an unspecified number of employee departures. One such rumor came from a former Castro team member, Mohit Mamoria, who posted on November 27th that the app would be “shut down over the next two months.”
Update January 10th, 2024, 8:50AM ET: Updated to reflect that the Castro app and website are back up and running, and added comment from a Tiny representative.
