Weight Watchers App Goes Glitchy Over Thanksgiving, Infuriates Users

One might argue that Thanksgiving—a notorious day of gluttony—would not be the ideal time for Weight Watchers to initiate an application upgrade. But upgrade they did, and as a result, the app has been almost impossible to use ever since.

Generally, Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee explains, Weight Watchers members “normally log their food and exercise in the program, which then calculates points (rather than calories) and tells people how many points they’ve used on a given day and how many they have left.” Users thus entrust the Weight Watchers program with a bevy of information critical to their diet plans. Obviously it is necessary that this information remain secure.

But as Buzzfeed reports, “the website and and app have…been glitchy to the point of being unusable, according to customers who are unhappy that the service went down during arguably the most food-centric time of year.” The glitches have impacted vast numbers: the roughly 1.5 million people paying to access both the Weight Watchers website and app. And of course, losing the ability to monitor diet and exercise during a critical time like Thanksgiving must have been distressing.

Amber Kowalski, a 25-year-old Weight Watchers subscriber, says as much to Buzzfeed:

“I literally depend on it for everything…Anything that goes in my mouth or I think about eating, I do. When you’re doing this it literally is a lifestyle change and you need to depend on this. The biggest thing that people are upset about is it’s the holiday season. Thanksgiving is when it was down — that’s one of the biggest times of the year. It’s not good for someone trying to diet or eat better, and you couldn’t even keep track of what you’re eating.”

Weight Watchers’s Facebook page is riddled with comments criticizing the application update and chronicling various new problems, including the disappearance of data and recipes:

In response, Weight Watchers has posted an apology on their page, as well as issued the following—somewhat defensive—statement to Buzzfeed:

“ At no point was our service down for all members. There were intermittent login issues for some members on Thursday last week, but those were resolved the same day. Separately, there are some issues syncing values for certain foods in our database, but our team has a fix on that going in (Tuesday) morning. And there are some discrepancies in syncing activity monitor data, which our team is working around the clock to fix.”