Media Temple went down, today.
There’s the message (just above).
Web and Email service interruption.
Severity: High
Services: All Services
The word “interruption” doesn’t even seem strong enough. The shock-waves were felt throughout the World (Wide Web). It ripped through 8BIT, taking everything down.
Twitter was in flames, littered with rants and apologies by Media Temple. Periodicaly they would Tweet this message:
Nameservers are currently down, effecting many services. Please see http://bit.ly/ih1lOS 4 info. Phone lines jammed, info posted here. ^SC
Or:
(mt) nameservers are currently down. Please see http://bit.ly/ih1IOS for updates. Twitter feed & phones are jammed, bear with us please! ^SC
It was a bad day at Media Temple.
Having your website go down, is like owning a business on Main Street and having a water line blow-up and making it impossible to do business for days. No traffic, no revenue. It’s really quite simple.
As a customer myself, I wasn’t very happy about it. I had to deal with my own customers who host their websites through me. The problem trickled down.
So what did Media Temple do? How do you respond to something this … well … ugly?
This is what they did, in the chaos of it all:
Yes, they Tweeted a video.
Media Temple did the only thing that can be done, other than fixing the problem. Sometimes, you can’t fix it immediately. Some things take time. So, what do you do in the meantime?
Communicate.
Let your customers, clients and co-workers know what’s going on. Leaving them in the dark is never a good idea.
This Media Temple video was awesome. Live from the trenches. This dudes face looks so stressed. He took it seriously. This video calmed me down. I could imagine all these guys going crazy to fix the issue. They wanted these Media Temple hosted websites back-up as much as the customers!
Media Temple is still Tweeting about it. Keeping everyone in the loop. Handling inquires and everything.
So, as an IT, communicate.
When it breaks: communicate.
As you are fixing it: communicate.
When it’s fixed: communicate.
After it’s all finished: communicate.
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