The Fastmail outage - longest ever by a major mail service?

[FMRocks]

Originally posted by alexu2000
Then try to do something to help the Fastmail team somehow. I don't know what you could do or what help the Fastmail team could accept from you. But you know, friends help each other during hard times. Try to help them somehow.

The "help" may well come in the form of pressure here. I think it might.

Bottom line, this outage wasn't fine and dandy, and I am not going to give off the impression that it was.

[alexu2000]

Originally posted by FMRocks
The "help" may well come in the form of pressure here. I think it might.

If you would have a boss who will pressure you everytime when you fail, will you like it better than a boss who try to help you become better? I had both type of bosses and I really appreciate the last type.

Bottom line, this outage wasn't fine and dandy, and I am not going to give off the impression that it was.

Yes, this is true. It was a major mistake and their affected users has all the rights to be mad. But we're not talking about a company who doesn't ever listen to their users. They do listen and they do care. So I know that they are doing their best to repair the damage and find ways not to deal with such kind of problems again.

[FMRocks]

Originally posted by alexu2000
I think I know how people behind Fastmail think.

Then you should also know how customers think when these things happen (including loyal customers). What you see here and now is pretty much the expected reaction, and while you have a right to complain that it's not fair, I think that it is, and it happens. I don't understand why it's ok to complain over consumer reaction but not to complain over a 72 hour outage.

[FMRocks]

Originally posted by alexu2000
If you would have a boss who will pressure you everytime when you fail, will you like it better than a boss who try to help you become better? I had both type of bosses and I really appreciate the last type.

One, I'm not FM's boss. Consumers and bosses are different people and put pressure on differently. Two, if those bosses were one sided like that, I wouldn't like either. Yes I want my boss to help me, but when I make a mistake of these proportions, I have to expect and accept with grace criticisms and yellings. It would not be wrong of my boss to yell at me if I messed up this big.

[alexu2000]

Originally posted by FMRocks
Then you should also know how customers think when these things happen (including loyal customers). What you see here and now is pretty much the expected reaction, and while you have a right to complain that it's not fair, I think that it is, and it happens. I don't understand why it's ok to complain over consumer reaction but not to complain over a 72 hour outage.

I think I don't know enough english to explain exactly what I meant. Sorry, it's my weak spot. I didn't wanted to sound this way. I think it's normal in this situation to complain and to express your feelings, but you did this once, twice, a lot of times, now why don't you do something more, something different to help them become better?

[FMRocks]

Anyways, can we please get back to discussing the topic, which is if this is the longest ever outage by a major mail service, instead of sparring over what's a fair criticism of FM and what is not?

[alexu2000]

Originally posted by FMRocks
Anyways, can we please get back to discussing the topic, which is if this is the longest ever outage by a major mail service, instead of sparring over what's a fair criticism of FM and what is not?

That's a good ideea

[rmns2bseen]

Originally posted by FMRocks
Phone service is hardly provided by the government. Or electricity. There are competing *private* providers of both everywhere. Let me add a few more in. Your ISP. Your GoToMyPC or a similar service. Your cable or satelite TV service. Your XM radio.

If I'm unhappy with my ISP, or with the phone service provider, it's simple: I find another one. Just as in email services. In my locality, I don't have a choice of who picks up my garbage or provides potable water or provides electricity: all of the above are provided by the local government or by entities that are closely regulated by the local government.

(edit) as for the topic, I have no idea which outage was longest

[Shelded]

The truth is, things change if this topic is at all able to be serious. 5 years ago it was routine for Runbox, MyRealbox, Hotmail, Yahoo to have down time regularly for the whole weekend. Now we have folks posting here who think this is the worst they have seen. Well, they're noobz, I guess. It happened so much there's no need to link to it.

But things have changed so much that the expectation is higher. Two days (or more) without service is simply unacceptable anymore.

Hey, Prog, some of the down times are so long they're still running -- they went down catastrophically and eventually came back with apologies and said they could not recover. So those run in terms of years.

[hadaso]

Originally posted by Prognathous
... Is Fastmail's unplanned 2-day outage going to become the holder of this dubious record?

Probably they are not even close to a record. I had a Onebox account (paid one) a few years ago, and then it became quite inaccessible. I don't remember all the details and the timings, but it was weeks that the account was unusable, and apparently it was for every user. It was quite impossible to get response from support there, but I remember some marketing type info about having to wait and that eventually it would result in a better system. I don't know if it did because eventually I deserted it and made the free Fastmail account I had into my main account. I guess there were longer outages then this (like: something went wrong. never fixed. service discontinued).

The thing I value most about FastMail is that there are people behind it that are "touchable". You hear them here. You get some responses. You get real info about what's happenning. If you report an issue the response is usually a solution). In most other services all you might get is a response from some marketing people saying something like "our engineers are working to resolve the issue", and you never even know what the issue was.

I don't expect FastMail to be perfect, or even close to this. Not getting form mail as reply to support requests, and knowing there are real people I can reach is enough for me. And I have a redundancy plan: it's called a telephone...

(BTW, I'm one of the lucky 95% not on server4.)

[Shelded]

If we had avatars here mine would say: "Still on Server4, restored in last 5%"

[hadaso]

Originally posted by Shelded
If we had avatars here mine would say: "Still on Server4, restored in last 5%"

That's a sig, not an avatar.
Your avatar might be this:
or this:
or this:
or this:

[theog]

Originally posted by FMRocks
If your water company turned off your water for 3 days, would would like it if they put up the defense you just gave of FM? What about your electric company? Your garbage pick-up service? Your phone company? Your cell phone provider?

I ask again, what kind of a defense is that?

server out = earthquake?

earthquake = no water for 3 days, no electricity, no garbage pick-up, no phone, no cell phone.

FM has the advantage = no loss of LIFE.

I'm not a sys admin (but I do play one on TV)... it seems that these things happen... sometimes no amount of (reasonable) redundency can prevent it...

[jdtaylor]

One old player bonnag.com which has since shut down, did have downtime, and at one pojt lasted for almost a week, but this was due to a DDOS Attacks, I know other providers I have used have Downtime, and in fact Omniliect which had it's email working for a matter of days, has gone down agaiin and this is after several months of being down due to apparent Managment issues, but I am waiting for them to come back online full time, as at the moment this player is well and truly on the blink almost like Fastmail and Hotmail a few years agp

[Shelded]

Originally posted by hadaso
That's a sig, not an avatar.
Your avatar might be this:
or this:
or this:
or this:

Naah, I was thinking of a shimmering T-shirt sort of thing, not a signature.