FeedBurner Suffers Outage, Leaving Customer Evangelists in the Dark

UPDATE (7/6/04): FeedBurner has posted an update on their recent outage.

FeedBurner, which powers RSS feeds for dozens of sites, has been down for several hours now and there's no communication whatsoever from the company as I write this post. I have dozens of subscribers to my RSS feed who all moved over to the FeedBurner feed because I asked them to and now they're in the dark. I elected to evangelize this company's services so I am ultimately responsible, still I find their lack of communication incredulous. This is an excellent lesson in how not to treat your prized customers. Nick Bradbury demonstrates the other side of extreme. He heard from his FeedDemon customers about their Internet Explorer concerns so he addressed them swiftly and effectively.

Comments

[dick costolo]

Steve, I apologize that your personal email was not responded to more quickly. You sent me a note, and I was out with unavailable this evening until now. To date, we have been thrilled with the performance of FeedBurner. Although we launched in pre-alpha, the site has performed exceptionally since inception. We are still publicly in pre-alpha, and one of the reasons we're in pre-alpha is that we are not yet satisfied with our upstream bandwidth redundancy, as we saw this evening. We have raised funding for the company and plan to use proceeds from this funding to significantly enhance the hosting environment for FeedBurner. Finally, the team reacted quickly this evening to the event and restored the environment as efficiently as I could hope.

[Neil T.]

I think you need to remember that FeedBurner is pre-Alpha at the moment. If you use a service that is still very much in its test phase then you should expect outages.

[Steve Rubel]

It's rather amazing to me that some 12 hrs after your outage you still have failed to update your loyal customers with a blog post. That's not a good way to run any business, sorry.

[Peter Caputa]

I am gonna have to disagree with Steve on this one. I think feedburner's response is excellent. An apologetic blog post would be nice, but not necessary.

Plus, Dick responded to your blog post. And you are the one with the issue.

Performance and scalability are impossible to get right the first time, when growing a new online business. It is an expensive proposition to get this right.

Especially, when it is a free service.

And for Steve to think that he is responsible to the people he referred, is ludicrous and somewhat pompous. People make their own decisions.

I think you need to unplug, Neo.

Bloggers are all about ranting, but I think sometimes we need to be a bit sensitive to company's too and remember that there are people behind them, doing the best that they can.

In feedburner's case, i think they are doing a damn fine job.

[arjanwrites.com]

Besides the outage I noticed another problem: Some of my stats were re-set as well. The "Content Popularity" stats are empty. Anyone care to comment on that?

I think FeedBurner should use its blog to post messages to users about maintenance issues and product development. I was an early user of TypePad and they kept users in the loop that way. Very helpful.

[matt shobe]

A reply to Arjan:

Again, our apologies for the FeedBurner outage; order has since been restored and your stats should have remained intact. You may see that the Content Popularity stats appear blank because it's a new month and your default stats timeframe display is "Month to Date." Therefore, you may not have recorded any clickthroughs at the time you noticed this issue. As a test, change the Summary Period to "Last 30 Days" and you should still see all of your June 1-July 1 click-throughs. As July marches on, your Content Popularity counts should continue to accrue.

Please let us know if things still don't look right from your perspective.

[Steve Rubel]

Peter, I appreciate your feedback, but FeedBurner's comments only alert my four readers - a tiny portion of their overall customer base. So a comment, while helpful, doesn't communicate the issue and planned solutions like a blog post does. I also understand that new services will hiccup. Again, my opinion is, tell all your customers.

[arjanwrites.com]

Ah! Call it new user ignorance:) I love this service! Thanks for the follow-up.

[Andrew Denny]

I understand that Feedburner is, at the moment, a test service. I took 'pre-alpha'to mean just that. I don't expect a full mission-critical service from it, certainly not since it's at the moment free. I was an MSN *beta* (not pre-alpha)tester in 1995, and remember it being far flakier then.

While a blog post (or an email to all users) might have been nice, I don't think the absence of one over 'several hours' is a problem for such an experimental service.

Incidentally, I've still got, unworn, an 'MSN beta tester' sweatshirt, sent by Microsoft as a thank-you when MSN launched. (collector's item; should I put it on Ebay?) Will we all get a Feedburner equivalent? :-)