DOWN again.

[groanerton]

Originally Posted by ioneja

+ for Twitter. I agree, it would be easy for all the FM techs to have access to the same Twitter account and post from their cell phones... PLUS use the FM status blog, which is the first place I go to check.

Also, to Wibble, I have to agree, there are plenty of us who are paying business customers, and as such, especially during the middle of afternoon of the business day in some parts of the world (i.e.: the US right now), we DEPEND on FastMail, and I think the tone here has been pretty good, actually... I don't really see "complaints" -- this is our living being impacted at times... That's why I have a paid service elsewhere just for these circumstances, but it FM really could do better than 99.86%... those little digits add up when they are in the middle of the business day.

hear hear. i RELY on this - i am a web developer and my clients are emailing me all day. the fact that you couldn't update the status blog remotely blows my mind. open up a damn free wordpress account and post there at least!

[mac'd]

Originally Posted by clocmor

Otherwise known as paying customers, and *fans* of FastMail, many of whom have recommended it to their own companies. So we want good communication when there are problems. OK?

Thanks to everyone who posted on the forum, so we could at least get an idea of the scope of the problem. But perhaps now is the time for FastMail to start using Twitter?

that's fine, but if i needed a twitter account to simply read status updates, that would just be wrong.

[Wibble]

Originally Posted by clocmor

Otherwise known as paying customers, and *fans* of FastMail, many of whom have recommended it to their own companies. So we want good communication when there are problems. OK?

Thanks to everyone who posted on the forum, so we could at least get an idea of the scope of the problem. But perhaps now is the time for FastMail to start using Twitter?

Apologies, paying whining little toads and weenies.

(I'm also a paying customer, and if we can't take a little teasing because we're so upset about the impact on our work, then I submit that we're taking our work a little too seriously)

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by Wibble

Apologies, paying whining little toads and weenies.

(I'm also a paying customer, and if we can't take a little teasing because we're so upset about the impact on our work, then I submit that we're taking our work a little too seriously)

Sense of humor noted, and we all need it at times. However, you never know with these Opera guys... they may mistakenly interpret it as a laissez faire attitude and think we all feel the same way. Anyway, I didn't mean to give you a hard time either, just pushing FM for better and better service...

[Nikolaos]

Thanks clocmor and goldtoday for the replies re. my earlier questions. Must bookmark that Twitter account for next time - just in case

Thought brong's comment about the new redundancy system failing more than the old single switch system was rather funny - there's Murphy's Law for you! Especially in IT - there's always going to be SOMEthing

I am glad it was fixed so quickly this time.

As for the comment about whiners - IMHO it's not a big deal if you're just using it for fun or running a freebie personal account, but if you are using your email account for business or mission critical/time-sensitive work, these downtimes can sometimes make a difference to one's business/reputation.

Being a paying account holder in such cases would obviously make one's expectations a little higher, and perhaps some would agree that handing over your hard-earned money for a service ought to give you some right to be interested in how a situation is handled/resolved?

Not trying to be argumentative here, just wanting to consider some legitimate reasons why people might be a little anxious when this sort of thing happens

[DumbGuy]

Originally Posted by clocmor

But perhaps now is the time for FastMail to start using Twitter?

I'm happy with the status blog and the forum as vehicles for staff notifications myself. I'm pretty sure both are hosted outside of the FM systems (blog on WordPress.com I think, and of course the forums here on EMD).

I've been in their position before in a previous sysadmin life, and I know the challenges of juggling multiple beyond-urgent priorities to recover a downed service with notifying customers. 2 channels to communicate to customers right now. Adding a 3rd (Twitter) - is that really necessary? Maybe, maybe not. But I like how brong likes to go into a little bit of detail of the outage on the status blog (and then sometimes Rob gives us the whole enchilada on the main blog after the post-mortem) -- and Twitter is only good for quick updates.

Originally Posted by groanerton

the fact that you couldn't update the status blog remotely blows my mind. open up a damn free wordpress account and post there at least!

I think they *can* update it remotely ('cause it's probably on WordPress.com), but it was their remote telecommuting system that was affected by the NYI failure.

[clocmor]

Originally Posted by mac'd

that's fine, but if i needed a twitter account to simply read status updates, that would just be wrong.

I have no particular axe to grind in favor of Twitter, but in this case we had several FastMail channels, none of which were updated. So anything that works

[brong]

Originally Posted by groanerton

hear hear. i RELY on this - i am a web developer and my clients are emailing me all day. the fact that you couldn't update the status blog remotely blows my mind. open up a damn free wordpress account and post there at least!

I could - but it's the usual tradeoff. We have a command that updates the status blog which I normally use - because of the type of failure, I couldn't use it straight away. I could log in and write a post by hand, or I could get myself in to the office ASAP and actually fix the problem. Posting a status update doesn't get it solved any faster.

So the status update was delayed while I ran through the snow... that's fun, let me tell you.

[brong]

as for the "whining toadies" - don't worry, I'm NYI's whining toady too. And I'm sure they are their uplinks' whining toady.

It's whining toadies all the way down!

[clocmor]

Originally Posted by brong

as for the "whining toadies" - don't worry, I'm NYI's whining toady too. And I'm sure they are their uplinks' whining toady.

It's whining toadies all the way down!

Thank you for all your efforts

But a plea as well. Even if it means using husky dogs, carrier pigeons, whatever - the one message we need to hear, even if there are no others until the issue is resolved, is "we know there's a problem and we're working on it"

[bbrener]

Originally Posted by clocmor

Otherwise known as paying customers, and *fans* of FastMail, many of whom have recommended it to their own companies. So we want good communication when there are problems. OK?

Thanks to everyone who posted on the forum, so we could at least get an idea of the scope of the problem. But perhaps now is the time for FastMail to start using Twitter?

Why on earth would I want to use Twitter to have my email outages communicated. Come to think of it, why on earth would I use it all? This is an email system for the masses and businesses. We don't communicate via Twitter in my company.

[brong]

Originally Posted by clocmor

Thank you for all your efforts

But a plea as well. Even if it means using husky dogs, carrier pigeons, whatever - the one message we need to hear, even if there are no others until the issue is resolved, is "we know there's a problem and we're working on it"

I know. We are actually in the process of building a new notification tool that will not only be able to notify us from more locations (including from outside New York if New York goes down) - but will be able to push status updates too (eventually)

[goldtoday]

Originally Posted by brong

I know. We are actually in the process of building a new notification tool that will not only be able to notify us from more locations (including from outside New York if New York goes down) - but will be able to push status updates too (eventually)

That is good news.

[brong]

FAR OUT - we appear to have gone offline again

[disneylogic]

High loss rate at NYSI, but it appears to be a Level3 issue.