My long time friend Ben Neumann has a detailed post up titled Network Outage. Ben is CEO / owner of Globat, a successful web hosting company. I met Ben through an acquisition in the late1990’s when Interliant bought his previous company Icom (also a web hosting company.)
Ben’s company had a tough day yesterday. Multi-hour critical failure is a way of life in any rapidly growing SaaS / hosting / web business. It’s nice to fantasize that it will never happen, but virtually every high growth company has "its moment of fun." It’s all in how you deal with it, how you treat and communicate with your customers, and what you learn from it.
Part of dealing with it is being open about what happened and what you are doing about it going forward. Ben does a nice job of setting an example here of how to do it.
On top of the outage, it was Ben’s wife Andrea’s birthday. Andrea – I hope you gave Ben a raincheck and decided to celebrate your birthday this weekend! Ben – hint – flowers, chocolate, jewelry, and a trip to Hawaii.