37signals today had 2 hours of downtime across all of their products. I use two of these heavily: Basecamp and Highrise. It was a real inconvenience to not have my task list available, and I was kicking myself for not printing it off earlier.
But despite the inconvenience, and massive failure, I feel better about sending my hard earned cash their way. Why? Because they communicated fast and remarkably well.
First, within minutes of the sites going down, a notice was put up:
All systems are currently offline as we’re experiencing network outage from our provider. We’re working on it right now. No data has been lost, all our machines are still working, but they’re not accessible from the internet. Sorry for the inconvenience.
— 10:03am CST (16:03 GMT) on January 18, 2008
Notice how address my immediate concern: data loss, and then an apology. Updates were delivered every 30 minutes and included easy to understand details with more apologies. It was clear that even though it was out of their hands, they were doing everything in their power to get it fixed. One of their last messages, “This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.” was nice. It helps to remember that they are people too, and while I have high expectations from their service, I have some understanding too.
Of course there is a cost/benefit to every service and if they fail too often I’ll look elsewhere. But, 37signals has increased my confidence that they can and will get this sorted out. People just don’t react that fast if they haven’t done most of their homework already.
Some other items of note:
- They now have a status web site (apparently it works even during system outages, but I only just learned about it)
- Quickly after the system was restored, they put a nice Downtime Notice “What happened?” note at the top of each page (pict above) with a link to a post with all of the details
Thanks 37signals for an excellent response to a tough situation!
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