
The bullshit of outage language - sant0sk1
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1528-the-bullshit-of-outage-language
======
icey
I call bullshit on this bullshit. When my systems go down, I _AM_ sorry if it
inconveniences my users. Why is this not OK? It beats the hell out of some
stupid-ass whale picture.

~~~
jwilliams
_It beats the hell out of some stupid-ass whale picture._

But there is a difference between an outage on a free service and a paid
service.

~~~
Tichy
The reality is that is impossible to have 100% uptime, or at least it would be
prohibitively expensive.

I think 37signals write about that themselves, and how they get away with 95%
or something.

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dabeeeenster
Hmmm. I remember a while back when 37s had a piece of hardware die, they
posted on their blog slating rackspace for not dealing with it quickly enough.
A while later they admitted they did not have a hot standby for the hardware
that failed (I seem to remember it was a load balancer, so kind of important).

So basically I call bullshit on this. How about when you have a failure you
don't blame a supplier who was not in the wrong? I'll try and find the blog
post.

~~~
jasonfried
We shouldn't have blamed Rackspace. Even if it was their fault, it's our
responsibility. Our customers pay us, not Rackspace. We learned from that and
haven't blamed anyone but ourselves from that point on.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Isn't it a litte high minded to blog about ways to communicate downtime when
the last time you experienced some you blamed your suppliers who were actually
blameless?

~~~
eru
One hopes people learned from their mistakes.

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tptacek
This is sort of ballsy, because they're going to have this throw in their face
next time they have an outage.

~~~
jasonfried
Hopefully next time we have to apologize for something going wrong we'll be
able to do a better job than the standard "We apologize for the inconvenience"
reply.

~~~
henning
here's how a company such as yours can do better (i'm addressing a web app
company in general, not 37s in particular):

* reassure users that the service was "merely" unavailable and no data was lost (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what happened and why to the best of your knowledge (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what you're going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again, within reason

* if the downtime is extensive, give paying users a free month or whatever of service (i think you would already do this), within reason

~~~
jwilliams
I agree that explaining the reasons/remediation is a good idea.

If you pay X for a service, generally you'll have an idea of the service level
and value you expect. I think most people are reasonable about this.

Customers that go off the rails (no pun intended) because of an outage in a
free/inexpensive service are probably customers you don't want to have.

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Tichy
"Also, you should find someone willing to take personal responsibility."

I strongly disagree here. I always hate this scapegoating behavior, and also
it irks me when for some public disasters a random person gets fired and then
supposedly everything has been amended. I don't care about the people about
your company, I just want you to not screw up. On the other hand, everybody
makes mistakes.

~~~
tallanvor
I agree - sort of. A company should always present a unified front, and no one
person should be asked to sacrifice himself (or herself) because of a problem.

Internally, however, you have to make sure you have processes in place to find
out what happened so that if someone was responsible, you can figure out where
they went wrong and teach them the procedures that will prevent the problem
from happening again (this assumes that the person or people weren't willfully
causing the problem, of course).

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condor
While I agree with David's sentiment, the more info the better . . . it
sometimes may be appropriate to have a stock answer when the event doesn't
really generate real emotion. <http://status.37signals.com/> "21:20 - 21:40AM
CDT DECEMBER 22 (3:20 - 3:40 GMT DECEMBER 23), 2008 Connection problems were
experienced to Basecamp and Highrise due to a misbehaving web server. We
apologize for the inconvenience."

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froo
Hmm, to be honest, I personally don't care about the language used in
apologizing for problems caused by downtime - downtimes happen to even the
most technically savvy of companies (Google + Gmail anyone?) so really, this
is like pissing in the wind.

Also as was mentioned on the first comment, 37signals has used almost those
exact same words they're condemning in this blog post. I'm not going to say
they're hypocrites... but the evidence is pretty compelling.

<http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/698-downtime-notice> _"We deeply apologize
for any inconveniences this may have caused"_

&

[http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2007/11/downtime-
explan....](http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2007/11/downtime-explan.html)
_"We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime caused your business."_

I'd much rather a company that operates services for 24 hours a day to be able
to let people know of the situation as it happens instead of apologizing
profusely about it the next day in personalized language.

That's just me though.

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iamdave
I don't know what's wrong with having a canned response. Addressing a problem
and ensuring folks that it's being rectified goes a lot longer than leaving
your customers out to dry or changing their diapers for them.

But, I guess it's easier said than done if you're ordering a bigger meal than
you can eat when your approach to running a business is making it about you,
and not your customers
([http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals?currentPage=all)).

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ojbyrne
He left out "thanks for your patience."

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jeffesp
This post reminded me of an JoS post here:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html>

At the time I wanted to see where I could apply the 5 why's, but never got
around to it.

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ryanmahoski
If the issue is not the responsibility or fault of the person I am speaking
with I do not expect their personal apology. If it is clear they are innocent
of wrongdoing it seems unnatural for them to slavishly gush about how sorry
they are.

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th0ma5
well i can't comment on their site? button just goes gray?

anyway... i think outage messages should have generic language, it is a key to
moving on or ignoring the notice...

but you should progressively be able to click for more details, down to the
point where if you're so curious why don't you help: here's a link to the
active outage discussion with the technicians

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cubicle67
Feature Request: The ability to tag two posts as identical, and combine their
comments.

