A small Internet company you might be familiar with raced to address a mammoth crisis. The relatively young firm took its system down for scheduled routine maintenance as it tried to install the technology it desparately needed for future growth. Unfortunately, the maintenance was anything but routine.
Shortly after the procedure started, the young Internet company's service came crashing down due to a hardware failure. It didn't return for some 14 hours. When the situation was finally corrected and the system rebooted, the site experienced “network anomalies” that kept it hiccuping for hours.
This company's paying customers were a social bunch; part of an online community. They naturally felt they were entitled to good service. And, understandably, they were outraged. This latest outage was the most serious incident in a long series of gaffes over the prior several months. Naturally, even as the young company scrambled to get back online, it apologized profusely as it faced its largest PR crisis to date.
But then, something remarkable happened. The entrepreneurial firm spent large gobs of cash to invest in new infrastructure. It sured up its service and worked hard to make it up somehow to its loyal customers. The dark tunnel became lighter.
This story I am recounting above is not about Six Apart, the company behind the popular TypePad blogging program that powers this blog. You can read all about what happened to their loyal customers today elsewhere. Even Brian Williams mentioned it. I am in the mood instead to let history be my guide. I am referring above to eBay on August 6, 1999.
Between 1998 and 2000 CNET published at least 15 articles documenting one eBay outage after another as the Internet auction giant struggled to scale. Several of the articles focused on stories of countless customers threatening to bolt. It was the auction site's darkest hour. Sound familiar? If you spent any time in the blogosphere today, It should. Go search for TypePad on Technorati.
You know what happened? eBay not only learned from this experience, they survived and they thrived. I am sure that five years from now lots of people will forget about today's incident and TypePad will not be called GripePad anymore. Six Apart will get it right and I am proud to remain loyal to their service as one of their more prominent bloggers. History repeats itself all the time and that's what's happening here. Now back to the regular blogging.
