It appears Typepad has been down for a while (since last night?). On 6/11/04, Everything Typepad! posted a “Scheduled Downtime June 12, 2004” which said the service would be down for maintenance from 12:00am to 2:00am – likely less. It’s 8:12am EST and it’s still down. Oops.
In my experience, all hosted software providers experience unexpected downtime – often early as they are ramping their service. I remember Ebay’s 12 hour outage, Critical Path’s two day outage, and a variety of hosting services taking thousands of sites off-line. You can almost see the technical people staring at the computers mumbling to themselves “Oh shit – I can’t get this back up – something’s toast and I can’t figure it out – beepers going off – panic sets in – sweat – focus – the magic reboot dance and incantation – nothing – guess I’ve got to call the boss in the middle of the night and share my stress with him”.
Hopefully the folks Six Apart / Typepad do the right thing after the successfully restore their service. IMHO, the right thing is:
1. Apologize profusely to their customers.
2. Provide one month of free service if it’s down for a substantial period of Saturday.
This would generate huge goodwill. Acknowledging a problem like this is important to building long term trust with your customers (I saw some posts on Trust yesterday, but alas, they are on Typepad hosted sites that I can’t link to right now). Typepad should be clear this is not an “entitlement” in the future, but instead should thank their earlier users with this type of acknowledgement.